For more than a century there has been a tendency to worship science as a key to knowledge and understanding. This preoccupation has served to determine the limits of potential knowledge. Science has created new problems almost as rapidly as it has solved old ones.
History records the phenomena of human life. It depends upon biographical data which are notoriously biased. Virtue or viciousness of character varies with the prejudice of the biographer. Most of what is told us in the realm of sexual behavior has been colored by, or has been a reaction to, social, moral, and religious convention.
Science proceeds by dissecting reality into its component parts. It has become so preoccupied with the study of these parts that it has failed to grasp the whole. Moreover, it is dependent upon knowledge which can be verified only through the use of the senses, with the result that its adherents have grown sceptical of philosophical and literary evaluations. Its study of elements and forces has led to abstractions, to a greater knowledge of unrealities.
In the realm of the sex variant, popular prejudice has reached and maintained its maximum height. The sex variant has always been with us and probably always will be. He has been thus classified, partly because of the arbitrary designations male and female. As I have shown in All the Sexes, there are any number of possible gradations of human behavior—from that of a theoretical masculine to that of a theoretical feminine being.
A particular person is always a complex of masculinity and femininity. Sex variants commonly are conspicuous through the exhibition of characteristics usually associated with the opposite sex. But science continues to recognize the fiction of male and female and has thrown little light on the problem.
The present work, Sex Variant Women in Literature, is a unique undertaking. The author was troubled in her student days by her lack of knowledge regarding female homosexuality. The need for understanding has resulted in a long search for evidence in literature, a field with which she was familiar. She has come to believe that imaginative as well as scientific writing is a mirror of human sexual behavior which should be given serious attention.
Some readers may question the propriety or the motives in associating the personal lives of authors with their writings. Poetry loses some of its charm through the suggestion that it might be an expression of the writer’s sexual maladjustment. But as a matter of fact it is beginning to seem that all imaginative writings are attempts to find libidinous satisfaction in fantasy. Science may never be able to support this impression by its laborious methods of securing evidence, but the author’s review of the literature of twenty centuries leaves little doubt of its validity.
In Sex Variant Women in Literature the author has called attention to lesbian tendencies wherever she has found them. She has made no attempt to estimate what proportion of imaginative writing may be the work of lesbians. She has not confined herself to literary classics but has accepted the fact that human beings reveal themselves in whatever they read and write. Sexual variance shows itself in so many different ways that all types of imaginative writings have to be studied if we are to understand human motivations and behavior.
George W. Henry, M.D.