Sex variant women in literature

This further repudiation of maternity heralds the final stage of her degeneration, a round of infamous adventures stimulated by drink and drugs. ‘Unwilling to believe there could be so little pleasure in vice, she chose to think she simply had not learned enough,’ and she frequents the most debauched Paris haunts, no longer bothering to select her partners, but seizing indifferently on servants and waitresses, to whom she becomes an object of terror. At last, suffering from hallucinations, largely of sexual odors, she consults a physician. His first advice is marriage; however, when he learns that she has already tried that and even borne a child, he advocates as a last therapeutic experiment the actual practice of motherhood.

Accordingly she fetches her sixteen-year-old daughter from the convent orphanage. The girl is graceless and unappealing and on sight awakens no sentiment but boredom. But while watching her asleep and half-clothed, Sophie is stirred by violent desire. And now in real horror of herself she leads the girl to the gate of Emmaline’s house where she can find her father and a true home, and entreats her to enter it and stay there. The book closes with an epilogue almost the literal duplicate of the prologue, for now the reader knows from what nightmare the doomed woman was seeking to escape when she plied her hypodermic needle.

Marred though it is by excess in length, incident and style, this novel holds interest because of its effort to present a complete life history and to account for its lesbian element. The chief trouble is excess in this respect also. While the “morne demon” possessing “Méphistophéla” seems at the outset an hereditary syphilitic taint, the author says at one point:

This could be sailing close to a biochemical explanation of psychopathology, or, employed by Mendès who was at least a nominal Catholic, it could indicate a half-serious suspicion of supernatural influence.

At another point he distinguishes between relatively harmless and “serious” homosexual activity.

There is no indication of heredity bearing the burden here. Indeed, Mendès seems to absolve his heroine from responsibility for her actions up to the time of her desertion by Emmaline and her escape to Paris; that is, so long as she is physically innocent and motivated by love. But from that point on, each step in her downward course results from a deliberate refusal of motherhood, the final one involving repudiation of even her early love for Emmaline. Interesting to a modern analyst would be her obsession with Emmaline’s breast, which had a parallel in Mlle Tantale’s reaction to her friend Camilla.

Josephin Peladan, author of La Gynandre (1891) states differently the same thesis: there is no such thing as lesbian Love, it is simply one of the sexual vices. This novel is one in a long series designed to expose all these vices under the heading La Décadence Latine, which unless checked, he says, forebodes the end of French civilization. (He also proclaims the volume to be in part a satire on current lesbian fiction.) The hero of the tale, a young intellectual known merely as Tammuz, is, like his author, both Catholic and Rosicrucian, his mission the conversion of Lesbos to a constructive worship of Eros. The only other male protagonist is a novelist, Nergal. These names are derived from Assyrian-Babylonian mythology and represent sun gods and the generative principle, in opposition to all the female lunar divinities.

A prologue incorporates the two men’s rapid survey of previous literature on female variance, from classical references through Catholic confessors’ manuals to Balzac, Gautier, and Baudelaire. Sappho’s influence, Tammuz decides, operated in so segregated a community of girls as to engender the cathartic intrasexual play common in such environments. In short, ‘Lesbos is the story of a pagan convent.’ The Catholic literature, of course, supports the thesis that lesbianism is merely ‘female sodomy.’ So also do belletristic works from Brantôme to Diderot. The Girl with the Golden Eyes is pronounced Balzac’s weakest effort because it represents lesbian passion as a motivating force for murder. Gautier gives them momentary pause, because Mlle de Maupin records lesbian activity between two women of high social status; however, it is the Catholic Baudelaire who offers them the most convincing evidence that the lesbian experience may approach real passion. Tammuz claims that such error merely foreshadowed Baudelaire’s mental collapse. After this formidable spearhead of symbolism and avowed moral purpose, the novel presents, with only faint satire, a cross-section of contemporary female variance. Interestingly enough, it claims that the vice had become general in Parisian society only within the previous decade, but it does not attempt to account for that sudden burgeoning.

Tammuz, an impoverished nobleman enabled by a windfall to spend a year studying life and love in Paris, is first introduced to the Orchids. This group is no more than a salon, its hostess a woman architect nearing forty. Her circle comprises a dozen idle young women, some married, ranging from a wide-eyed orphan of seventeen who has been “taken” in her lonely innocence by the first man who showed her any attention, to a beauty who worships her own dazzling skin far too much to risk its damage by male caresses. The presiding spirit, Aril, is sufficiently the diplomat to make each of her protégées feel valued and to avoid tension by playing no favorites. Tammuz is unable to discern much real passion among the group for either Aril or one another, and no lesbian activity save as outsiders stimulate it. A seductive actress-courtesan may strike a momentary spark, or curious provincial women in Paris for a brief fling may provoke some of the girls to exhibitionistic petting, but all soon lapse again into emotional indolence. Their common need is mainly companionship and freedom from the male aggression from which all have suffered in one fashion or another. Aril’s need is scope for her powers of domination.

That the whole business is rather a pose is apparent in the women’s adoption of picturesque nicknames—not masculine—and is further attested to by the confession of a senior member. While protesting her own and the group’s willingness to die for Aril, she makes clear to the young man that all of them are more thrilled by his masculine interest than by anything happening among themselves.

Tammuz’s next field for study is the Royal Maupins, a fencing club housed and headed by a deserter from the Orchids too masculine to submit to Aril’s dominance. Whereas the Orchids were all passive-feminine, even though one or two were tall, small-breasted and narrow-hipped, the Maupins consciously affect masculinity, in their nicknames, and in wearing fencing hose and men’s silk shirts exclusively in the privacy of their quarters. Here the prime favorite is not the hostess and nominal leader but “the Chevalier,” a woman who has avoided overt expression of all emotion, variant or normal, and whose “purity” Orchids and Maupins alike hold in such reverence that they forbear trying to win her from it. She shows an immediate predilection for the young man whose self-mastery in the pursuit of an ideal equals her own, and this semi-defection from the lesbian cause wakes violent jealousy among the pettier Maupins. A trio of them provokes Tammuz to a match with their most skilled fencer, fitting his opponent with a plastron beneath her tunic and substituting untipped blades for regulation foils. Their apparent plot is to kill him in the guise of accident. But the young man divines the trick, makes the sign of the cross with his blade, and contrives to break off the tip of it in his opponent’s concealed guard, escaping with a superficial wound. The exposure of the trick results in the expulsion of the offending trio and in the Chevalier’s betrayal of an overmastering love for him. Although he feels an equal attraction, he goes his way. He diagnoses the Maupins as poseurs whose prototype is the swashbuckling male adolescent, still encumbered by feminine weaknesses while lacking the male virtues of intelligence and impersonality.

His further “studies” in Paris lead him to a bathing club where the sexual play of “socialites” is indistinguishable from that of courtesans, and to the dressing rooms and studios of actresses and artists where similar behavior is even more brazenly manifested. Along the way he accumulates male gossip in the best clubs and sensational stories from the yellow journals, all of which he holds heavily responsible for nurturing the legend and cult of Lesbos.

There remains a famous lesbian group secluded in a chateau on the coast of Normandy to which he makes an unannounced visit. Here the leader is a Russian princess, whose name has become a byword for lesbian excess—possibly a satiric imitation of Méphistophéla. Tammuz finds the Princess Simzerla a proud but pathetic stripling of thirty whose excursions into vice have been, like Méphistophéla’s, a sterile quest for some satisfying love. Knowing all the gossip about her before leaving Paris, he offers his sympathetic and seemingly clairvoyant analysis of it to the princess while she is disguised as her own brother and unaware that he knows her identity. This kindly understanding, the first she has ever met, leads her—with time out for a quick change into feminine costume—straight into his arms. Tammuz, as always, has sufficient control to treat her as a sister, for he has decided that the way to ‘save Lesbos’ is not by converting any single individual to heterosexual passion, not even the notorious archetype, Simzerla, but by completely foregoing that physical victory against which most of them have rebelled. If he gives himself to one, his imaginative hold on all the rest is lost.

He finds Simzerla’s group more mature and diversified than those previously encountered, most of them near thirty and fugitives from Parisian notoriety. He spends some weeks studying them individually and collectively, leading them into such literary and philosophical discussion as they are capable of, and spying for passionate attachments. He is unable to discover that more than one couple indulges in any physical expression, and that is rather anemic. Furthermore, in the course of their group effort to write a lesbian drama he obtains final evidence to support what he has felt throughout his study (and, one might add, before he began): women have no powers of impersonal or abstract thought nor any creative intellectual capacity. It is he who contributes as much of the drama as is written.

His final observation is made aboard the yacht of a Swedish-American transvestist known as the Phantom Princess, though she has acquired the actual name of Limerick from a British [sic!] peer, her deserted husband. Rumor has credited her with maintaining a floating ‘Lesbos’ to equal Simzerla’s, but Tammuz finds it no more than a luxury craft of masculine simplicity manned by a hard-bitten male crew. “La Fantôme” has experimented with both men and women more lustily than Simzerla, and is completely disillusioned about the existence of Love. Weary of sensual indulgence, she now permits herself no more than occasional voyeurism, having her crew bring aboard waterfront women for orgies which she observes from the captain’s bridge.

Because she is the most masculine of all the women he has encountered, Tammuz enjoys more intellectual companionship with her than with the others. He finds her capable of understanding his concept of woman’s proper role in the scheme of things—that of Frea, goddess of fertility. She is quite in accord with his refusal to deify Love aside from its procreative aspect, and shares his unreadiness to sacrifice an impersonal quest or even personal liberty on the altar of Romance.

Informed early by one of the Maupins that many women’s inability to respond to men is due to the ugliness of modern male garb, Tammuz has assumed on occasion a more graceful costume—modified Directoire—and with the Princesse Fantôme he dresses in gray silk fencer’s hose and a jacket of violet velvet. She reciprocates by appearing at dinner in an evening gown of ivory moiré, above which her white shoulders, deeply tanned face and cropped hair create a ludicrous effect. Tammuz, however, is touched by this effort at refeminization, and before long the two are enjoying a passionate interlude against that grandest of all settings, the open sea.

The inevitable sequel is La Fantôme’s holding him captive aboard the yacht in obedience to a newborn feminine hunger for permanence, and only a providential near-shipwreck frees him. Her desire is that they die in each other’s arms; his, that he be spared to pursue his mission against Lesbos, and their escape from death can be attributed only to supernatural intervention in his behalf.

He now returns to Paris, and in completing his study of Lesbos he accumulates as it were the dregs of naturalistic data—lesbian sadism, gross exhibitionism, the gift to his mistress by an infatuated nobleman of his fifteen-year-old daughter, an excursion into lesbian prostitution on the part of a countess in order to earn a fortune for her beloved who is a “regular” prostitute. As his money and his time run out, Tammuz, as was foreseen, is convinced that his findings prove his initial thesis: lesbianism is not a distinct psychological entity but merely one of the sins of the flesh. Its causes are numerous—comparative frigidity, feministic rebellion, defiance of undeserved social opprobrium, cynicism about all love. And productive of, or augmenting, all these is the brutality or carelessness of men, their indifference to individual personality in their approach to women. Tammuz knows that by virtue of his sexless sympathy he could have had any one of the scores of lesbians he has studied. Believing, then, that he has achieved a far-reaching psychological victory, he risks clinching it by a ruse which, as he himself observes, ‘would make the angels of orthodoxy hide their eyes with their snowy wings.’ In short, he stages a celebration of the rites of Eros, on the grounds that the proper cure for emotional aberration is not orthodox denial of the flesh but pragmatic trial of the normal.

Easy as it is to ridicule Peladan’s second-rate symbolism and although his reportage may not be dependable, there is much psychological soundness in his analysis of lesbian types, however melodramatic the personal histories he fabricates to account for them (and perhaps also to forestall attempts to identify their originals). The composite personality of Tammuz and Nergal is sound—the idealistic, somewhat effeminate man such as variant women are often drawn to. And in L’Androgyne,[30] the complementary study, in his “épopée,” of homosexual tendencies during male adolescence, he shows sympathy with the very type he scorned the Maupins for imitating, so long as it is a passing stage in male development. Just as evolutionary ideas were in the air long before Darwin systematized them, so the theory of emotional maturing now attributed to Freud was antedated in literature.

Even after discounting Peladan’s and Mendès’ Catholic bias and their romantic extravagance, their canvases give evidence to widespread lesbianism in fin de siècle Paris, and echoes of it and of the crop of fiction it bred must have been far reaching. Amusing proof of this fact is at hand in a light-hearted farce written in 1892 by two Americans, Archibald Gunter and Fergus Redmond, entitled A Florida Enchantment. A transvestist tale, it involves no real intrasexual experience (in this respect harking back to medieval and renaissance romances), but its intent must have been unmistakable burlesque of such novels as Rachilde’s and Peladan’s. In Part I, “The Metamorphosis of Miss Lillian Travers,” the heroine discovers that her fiancé is dallying with a ripe widow, and at about the same time she acquires four seeds from an African “tree of sexual change.” Since the casket containing these is a relic from a slave-trading grandfather long dead, there is no chance of replenishing the supply. Embittered by her lover’s faithlessness, Lillian decides to move from the category of deceived woman into the obviously happier one of philandering man. To gain an ally in the venture she persuades her negro maid to join her in swallowing a seed, and both become sexually male, though to all ordinary appearances they are still women.

Part II, “The Boyhood of Lilly Travers,” recounts the hilarious and salacious adventures of the two ‘trans-sexists,’ to coin the only appropriate term. Lilly’s young cousin Bessie falls in love with her, as does also the widow hitherto involved with her fiancé. Lilly wholeheartedly reciprocates Bessie’s love, but the cousins’ bedroom scenes are kept at the level of farce and never go the implied lengths of Ariosto’s or d’Urfé’s in similar circumstances. At one point Lilly attends a ball where she dances exclusively with women, apparently without incurring social criticism—a detail which, if as realistically accurate as the rest of the winter resort setting, gives evidence of American naïveté in the 1890s. The negro maid’s adventures are naturally somewhat more rabelaisian than those of her mistress but stop short of being censorable.

Part III, “The Wonderful Adventures of Mr. Lawrence Talbot,” presents Lilly’s life after she has managed to assume male garb and name. The former fiancé suspects Lawrence of having murdered his cousin Lilly for her fortune, and challenges him to a duel intended to be fatal. To protect himself Lawrence forces the man to swallow the third magic seed, whereupon he becomes a grotesquely masculine woman, just as Lawrence is a beautiful and beardless youth. Now Lawrence and Bessie marry and set out for Europe, but the unhappy ex-fiancé pursues them, threatens Lawrence with exposure, and points out that Bessie, on learning the truth, will certainly swallow the fourth seed in order to learn the delights of being a man, and will thus be lost forever as a wife. The only solution is to present the villain with the means of regaining his manhood, so that he can get the widow, who is still infatuated with Lawrence, out of his way by marrying her. There is no evidence that this jolly bit of satire (discovered quite accidentally by the present writer) was reviewed or otherwise noted either at home or abroad, nor did it deserve to be from a literary viewpoint. It is worthy of mention here, however, as showing that America was aware of variant fiction other than that of Henry James.

To return once more to France, during 1896 the Mercure de France carried serially Remy de Gourmont’s Le Songe d’une Femme, a work of higher quality than any since James’s The Bostonians. In the form of correspondence among some dozen persons it presents an exhaustive analysis of what constitutes a satisfactory sexual relationship. The central figures are a sensitive intellectual, Paul; a simple, sensuous, and radiantly happy Annette; and a fascinating but physically inhibited Claude whose emotional pattern closely resembles that of Mlle Tantale without being similarly accounted for. Claude is married and has also experimented sexually with an artist for whom she posed in the nude, but she has never achieved satisfaction. She exerts an irresistible charm over women but has found relations with them equally unrewarding. For a time she falls under the spell of Annette’s open-hearted warmth, but Annette scorns lesbianism as childish. Claude dreams of a perfect love which will be more than fleshly, and for a time she is hopeful of realizing her ideal with Paul. During what might be called a probationary period she holds him captive by giving him “all her thoughts,” and permitting generous caresses without complete surrender. Paul has cherished a similar dream and has found Annette too exclusively sensual. In the end, however, he abandons Claude for the simple and more “natural” woman. Claude, he finds, can bring happiness to no one, not even herself. The implication is that for anyone who seeks romantic perfection all love must end in failure—a direct echo from Baudelaire. De Gourmont’s title pronounces such an ideal typically feminine: a woman’s dream.

The last important negative item before 1900 was Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” (1898). If his delineation in 1885 of the Bostonian Olive Chancellor was moderate enough to leave critics dubious whether he intended her as a lesbian, there is nothing ambiguous in his later story. In one of his letters, James himself says that his intention was to give “the impression of ... the most infernal imaginable evil and danger.”[31] In this novelette, an innocent young governess goes to a remote English country estate to take charge of two orphans, a boy of ten and a girl of eight. The children’s precocious beauty and charm strike her at once as more than normal, and apprehension dawns with her learning that the boy has been expelled from his school for reasons carefully evaded in the letter of dismissal.

Soon she has glimpses about the grounds of a repellently attractive man and an equally sinister woman, who prove to be apparitions visible only to herself. From a reluctant housekeeper she extracts that the man, a former groom now dead, had “had his way” with any woman in the household or neighborhood that he chose, and that the female spectre, in life her predecessor as governess, had departed pregnant by him and died in London of an abortion. These indelicate facts James characteristically conveys by indirection, never by the bald word. Both these personalities had been evilly intimate with the children.

Discovering that her awareness and antagonism can hold the spectres at bay, the governess devotes herself to protecting the children from them. She soon learns to her horror, however, that the little girl not only sees the dark woman but exerts self-control and histrionic talents beyond the capacity of most adults in order to conceal the fact. The boy becomes genuinely devoted to the governess and tries to cooperate in resisting the male ghost, but, always fragile, he succumbs to the emotional conflict and dies of a heart attack. The little girl, more completely dominated—might an affectionate man have weakened the spell for her as a woman did for the boy?—realizes now that only she and the governess can see the apparitions. With precocious acumen she accuses the governess of insanity, sensing that a child’s word will stand against that of a potentially hysterical spinster, and achieves her enemy’s removal.

This is the first literary appearance of lesbian corruption of a child by an adult, and is probably attributable to the increasing publication of clinical case studies, for the theme has recurred at least twice in the subsequent half-century. James’s aversion can be explained on a number of counts. Where in The Bostonians he studied well-bred women, his antagonists here are debauched members of a lower class. Then, too, it is known that he had abandoned an original plan of taking up permanent residence in Paris because he found the atmosphere there morally uncongenial, and he had settled in England, which had been rocked only three years earlier by the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde for homosexuality. It is conceivable that a desire to deny unequivocally any sympathy with that phenomenon helped to motivate The Turn of the Screw.

The final French writer of importance to treat of lesbianism before the turn of the century was Pierre Louÿs, who wrote more in the spirit (though not the style) of Gautier, Verlaine or Zola than in that of his contemporary anti-lesbian crusaders. His Chansons de Bilitis (1894) and Aphrodite (1896) purported to be the fruit, respectively, of translation and intensive classical research, and to give accurate pictures of life in early Greece and Alexandria. Classicists promptly exploded his claim and accused him of sensational exaggeration; nevertheless the two works enjoyed enormous popularity at the time and have since been reissued every few years in English as well as French. The Songs of Bilitis, in free verse reminiscent of the Greek Anthology, pictures the life of a girl from her bucolic childhood in Pamphilia, through young womanhood on the isle of Lesbos, to her end as a prosperous courtesan in Cyprus. In her teens she bears a child but leaves it behind without a qualm when adventure leads her on. The emotional highlight of her roving existence is the period in Mitylene, during which she loves and marries another girl with whom she lives happily and faithfully for a decade. However spurious their Hellenism, the poetic quality of the Chansons is high, and they have been repeatedly imitated and translated in English, German, Swedish, and Czech. One German translation of twenty-four of the songs was made by Richard Dehmel, a poet in his own right.

In Aphrodite lesbianism is only incidental, but still it recurs throughout, including the daily ministrations of a slave girl to a courtesan mistress who accepts them as she does her bath or food; the courtesan’s intermittent play with a pair of younger flute-girls; and the flute-girls’ marriage, like that of Bilitis, in which they find solace for the depravities they must see and endure as paid entertainers. That Louÿs was aware of every possible sort of lesbian activity is evident, but confining his attention as he does to courtesans, he adds little to an understanding of variant relationships among other classes of women. It is the taller and stronger of his pairs who always plays the male role, and the only other suggestion of etiology is the excessive worship of female beauty, dominant in the cults of Isis or Aphrodite. It was in this respect particularly that he was accused of distorting historic fact. As Louÿs pictures this worship, it is closely related to feminine narcissism.

Louÿs’s Adventures of King Pausole published at the turn of the century is a rollicking tale, supposedly contemporary, but wholly fanciful in setting. One of its characters preaches the saving grace of healthy promiscuity as opposed to the prudish constraints of romantic love. Wholesome citizens, he says, come from the slums where children run loose. Strictness in raising the young, breeds maladjustment and neurasthenia. Voluntary exclusive devotion to one individual leads to the madness of an Orestes, the tragic end of a Marguerite, or the suicides of Romeo and Juliet.

The lesbian pattern in his fantastic design is woven about Mirabelle, a danseuse reminiscent in physique and temperament of Maupin. She easily captivates the kings’ daughter, Aline, for, although the royal Pausole himself has a harem of 365 women, he has kept his child as secluded as Salammbo. Brought to his senses by Aline’s “elopement” with Mirabelle, and by several adventures he has while searching for the pair, the king embraces the doctrine of freedom for the young to the extent of smiling on Aline’s marriage (at fifteen) to a page who speedily converts her to the joys of heterosexual love. The dancer happily encounters a young noblewoman who, like herself, has known men but has dreamed of a woman partner, and their union apparently becomes permanent. Thus, Louÿs compromises between the promiscuity advocated by his spokesman in the book and the current romantic ideal.

In the factual literature on homosexuality one finds ambiguous allusions to more variance in French fiction between 1880 and 1895 than it has been feasible to pursue, but considering the returns on those verified it is unlikely that any important lesbian works even of low quality have gone undetected. In 1896 Rachilde’s signed reviews began in the Mercure de France and a little later the first bibliography of belles-lettres in Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch listed a few retrospective titles along with current notes. These two systematic sources show that perhaps a dozen minor French novels appearing during the last half dozen years of the century (none were available for examination), dealt with variance to some extent. Such titles as Mlle Wladimir, Mon Mari and Satana indicate close imitation of such earlier successes as Mlle Giraud and Méphistophéla. The majority seem to have made at least a pretense of condemning lesbianism, but Rachilde remarked acidly in reviewing one of them (Jane de La Vaudère’s Les Demi-Sexes, the theme of which was ovariotomy undergone by women sufficiently eager for masculinity) that she wished novelists would stop peddling sensationalism under the guise of medical instruction or moral preachment.[32] The cheery insouciance of King Pausole was clearly an innovation and marked the beginning of a new period. As for the few novels published in Germany before 1900, since they were the first of their kind they will be left for consideration with twentieth-century material from which they are indistinguishable.

Summary

Before leaving the nineteenth century a brief summary of its variant writing will be illuminating. That a preponderance of the material was in French will not surprise English readers, who have long recognized the comparative frankness of France in matters of sex, at least until our own last decade or so. In view of the quantity and variety of attention devoted to the subject, however, the proportion of sympathetic treatment is low. Of the more than a dozen authors who took overt lesbianism as a major theme, seven—Coleridge, Baudelaire, Belot, Mendès, Peladan, Strindberg, and Gourmont—condemned it explicitly, though with differing degrees of severity. Seven others—Latouche, Balzac in The Girl with the Golden Eyes, Rossetti, Swinburne in Lesbia Brandon, Maupassant, Rachilde in Mme. Adonis, and James in The Turn of the Screw—made lesbian affairs responsible for murder, suicide and ruin, and so implied equally strong condemnation. Only three were tolerant, and of these Louÿs, for all his championing of sexual freedom generally, hurried Aline in King Pausole into a heterosexual match at fifteen, and depicted Bilitis as promiscuous from puberty to death save for her lesbian interlude. Gautier was sympathetic to a single lesbian experience but predicted an unhappy future for Maupin. Verlaine alone, himself homosexual, let his portraits stand without comment. The several authors who included minor lesbian episodes pictured them as involving gravely maladjusted women or as the pastime of prostitutes and other questionable characters.

Of the four novelists who used variance as a major theme but avoided or denied lesbian implications, James in The Bostonians considered it a menace to society, Lamartine showed it as contributing to failure in heterosexual adjustment, Balzac in Seraphitus-Seraphita made it a mystic apprenticeship for marriage, and only Wollstonecraft exalted it above experience with men.

Quite as notable as this limited sympathy for variance is the frequency of heterosexual action. Some eighty primary and as many or more secondary characters are involved in the total of variant scenes, and of these only half a dozen indubitably never knew men. (For a number of the minor figures definite evidence is lacking, but indications are that they belonged in the bisexual group.) To be sure, several women had involuntary and/or distasteful experience with men, but the majority eventually found such experience preferable to variant relations.

When it is noted in conclusion that the proportion of male to female authors is even larger than that of French to English, one cannot avoid inferring some causal relation between the fact and the statistics above. This impression is confirmed by noting that the four feminine writers, Wollstonecraft, Schreiner, Rossetti and Rachilde, pictured no successful heterosexual relations. “Mary” refuses to consummate her marriage; Lyndall commits slow suicide to escape hers; Raoule achieves a fantastic evasion, and Mme. Adonis takes the man of the couple she captivates in a spirit of vindictive sadism. The hypothesis of a very natural sex bias with regard to feminine variance will be amply supported in studying twentieth-century authors.