Sex variant women in literature

Introduction

The early twentieth century has already been cited as relatively tolerant of homosexuality. To the extent that it prevailed, this tolerance was due to popular acceptance of hereditary theory. We have noted Karl Ulrichs’ defense of male homosexuals in the 1860’s on the ground that their proclivities were innate. Within the next three or four decades, scores of case studies, current and historical, were accumulated to support or to oppose this claim. On the one hand there were exclusively homosexual histories of persons whose physical traits approached those of the other sex. On the other were records of homosexuals cured by hypnosis in the clinics of Charcot and Magnan. The majority of cases fell between these two extremes. Many were bisexual. Many persons reporting obsessive homosexuality were somatically normal. Following the lead of the biological sciences, students of the problem attempted to classify homosexuals. The subjects were variously divided into “true” or born and “pseudo-” or elective; “masculine” and “feminine” in general appearance; active and passive in the sexual role; homosexual and bisexual. But the determining data were less objective than is desirable for close classification. And although each dichotomy was independently more or less sound, there was little correlation among the logically related groups from the several divisions.

The resulting confusion seems now to argue against, rather than for, the claim of somatic causation of variance. But at the time the recent or current publications of Darwin, Mendel and Galton provided rich soil for the cultivation of any hereditary theory; so the men best remembered today for their work on homosexuality are Krafft-Ebing, Moll and Hirschfeld in Germany, and in England Symonds, Ellis and Carpenter, all of them strongly inclined toward a hereditary explanation of the phenomenon. By 1900 most of these men’s contributions to the subject were in print and widely disseminated, so that in scientific and intellectual circles there was much talk of an intermediate sex whose condition was referred to as inversion—Ellis’s term, as noted earlier.

The effect on homosexuals was naturally pronounced. From being generally regarded as moral lepers they felt themselves restored to human dignity, as biological sports, perhaps, and in a distinct minority, but no more reprehensible than albinos or color-blind people. Many were encouraged to write, many other authors took a more liberal view of them, and the public began to accept the new outlook in literature. Tolerance was by no means general, however, even in the great metropolitan centers where for years a certain degree of it had obtained. In the medical profession negative opinion was strong, and, of course, conservatives in all fields battled against the new “demoralizing” influence as long and bitterly as their predecessors had against Darwinian evolution.

Geographic infiltration of tolerance was markedly uneven. France, where interest if not sympathy was already widespread, was comparatively hospitable to the new attitude. Germany, despite its being the birthplace of the hereditary viewpoint, was somewhat less so. Sentiment there might have developed more favorably if, in 1906, military interests had not used the charge of homosexuality as a weapon against Philip von Eulenberg, whose pacific influence on the Kaiser they wished to eliminate.[1] Even so, the effects of the Eulenberg affair were not so sweeping as those of the Oscar Wilde case in England a decade earlier.

A retrospective glance at England shows that during the 1880’s the publisher, Vizetelly, had managed to get into circulation a million copies of current French fiction before legal battles with the censor impoverished him, and, also, that a number of major critics had supported his efforts.[2] All were fighting for greater general liberality in matters of sex, but after the Wilde scandal in 1895, the public reacted strongly against homosexual activity. Havelock Ellis had to publish his volume on sexual inversion (1896) in Germany, and even there its appearance was not welcomed; consequently, his other Studies in the Psychology of Sex came out in America a decade before England would permit their publication.

America was the scene of no dramatic inhibiting episodes; however, our intellectual isolation retarded awareness of relaxing European attitudes towards inversion until Freud’s influence had also been felt. While the wave of tolerance was spreading slowly from its continental origins, a counterforce was growing there. Sigmund Freud had begun his work with Breuer and Charcot before 1890 and was a practicing psychoanalyst by the turn of the century. The year 1905 saw the publication of his first important treatise; and in 1909 G. Stanley Hall, psychiatrist, and president of Clark University, invited Freud to lecture at a conference in celebration of that institution’s twentieth anniversary.

Almost immediately the foundations of the hereditary theory were threatened. For Freud’s thesis, as no one needs reminding in this generation, was that the human personality passes through several phases of sexual development, beginning in earliest infancy, and reaching maturity only with complete heterosexual experience. All individuals, he said, are potentially bisexual. In some, the homosexual component becomes conscious and active, and unless this phase gives way with the passing of adolescence to the heterosexual, the personality remains arrested and immature. Such an arrest constitutes neurosis, whether or not it becomes troublesome enough to demand psychiatric attention.

As is obvious, this view contradicts the hereditary theory at several important points. It holds that the homosexual is not born, but made by conditioning factors in his early life, chiefly family relations before he is five years of age. He can usually overcome his neurosis if he earnestly wishes, at least with the aid of psychiatry; therefore, he may be considered more or less responsible for his state if he persists in it. Furthermore, the bisexual is nearer to maturity than the homosexual. This conclusion is particularly opposed to the tenets of the Ellis-Hirschfeld school, which classed frigidity to the opposite sex as a mark of “true,” that is, innate and blameless, homosexuals. The battle between the hereditary and the Freudian theories can be detected in a good deal of twentieth-century variant fiction.

The pendulum swung again toward physical causation with the development of endocrinology, which at first held the individual’s glandular endowment responsible for his sexual inclinations. This science began as a branch of general physiology, and acquired major sexual importance only with Steinach’s and Voronoff’s famous experiments in rejuvenation through graft of sex glands or other reinforcement of sex hormones. In the variant field, endocrinologists were first concerned with glandular influence on secondary sex characteristics—breast development, hair distribution, vocal register, et cetera. Thus, during the 1920s and 1930s a number of physicians were attempting to cure homosexuals by dosing them with hormones which reinforced their biological sex and tended to decrease variant traits. These experiments enjoyed some publicity in medical literature but had only limited success. In the meantime, disciples of Freud were bringing in evidence that psychological disturbances alter endocrine balance. The final compromise is the current school of psychosomatic medicine.

To bring scientific opinion on homosexuality up to date, attention must be given to four further attacks upon the problem. Most closely in line with early search for physical causation are accumulations of exact somatic measurements by such different agents as the so-called Harvard group in their Explorations in Personality—a clinical ... study of fifty men of college age (only a partial publication of their findings), and G. W. Henry in his Sex Variants. Neither of these studies has, so far as published material indicates, established significant correlations between homosexuality and any somatic factor or group of factors measured.

A statistical study limited to genetics was made in Germany during World War II by Theodor Lang.[3] On the ground that the offspring of a large group of parents should by the law of probability be equally divided between the two sexes, he made a statistical count of the siblings of several thousand homosexual men. He found a greater proportion of males among these than among siblings of a control group of heterosexuals. From this he argued that the homosexuals, though somatically male, possessed more than the average number of female genes, their brothers having in the aggregate more of the male determinants. Like all such studies this has been attacked on the grounds of its statistical soundness, but it has not been discredited. More conclusive in the same field is J. F. Kallman’s study of twins, Heredity in Health and Mental Disorder (1953). Dr. Kallman compared, among other things, the incidence of homosexuality in identical and non-identical twins. Identical twins showed an enormously larger percent of similar sexual behavior than the latter, and his evidence is conclusive that “a genetically oriented ‘imbalance’ theory ... can no longer be regarded as an implausible explanation for certain groups of ... homosexuals.”[4]

In the psychoanalytic field such dissenters from the so-called pan-sexualism of Freud as Jung, Adler, Horney and others have assembled evidence that sex is not always the prime cause of neurosis. Freud found it to be so, they say, because in his day social taboo made it the most common cause of insupportable tension. Now that sexual standards are less rigid (thanks in part to Freud’s work), other factors such as the thwarting of the ego or long-continued insecurity appear of almost equal importance. To account for the homosexual, these later psychoanalysts suggest such causal factors as early social humiliation resulting in withdrawal from heterosexual competition, acute anxiety with regard to childbearing, or reluctance to assume responsibility for a family. Still regarding homosexuality as a neurosis, that is, an abnormal way of escaping an untenable situation, they leave unanswered the question as to what predisposes an individual to the choice of this particular solution of his difficulties.[5]

Most publicized of this century’s contributions are undoubtedly the monumental statistical studies of sex behavior by the biologist A. C. Kinsey, which have shown homosexual experience to be more prevalent than hitherto claimed even by Ellis or Hirschfeld. Insofar as Kinsey attacks causes, he is with the Freudians in holding that all individuals are potentially bisexual, but there the agreement ceases. Kinsey’s contention is that the human sex drive will find outlet according to its strength in a given individual, and that its satisfaction via the same sex is due to the sensitivity of erogenous zones to any adequate stimuli. This explains satisfactorily the behavior of bisexuals and of homosexuals whose opportunities are largely confined to their own sex, but to account for those who are frigid to the other sex Kinsey is obliged to admit the importance of subjective factors.

This brief survey indicates how much the social attitude toward variance has relaxed since the days of Belot and Peladan. Today the sternest counsellors of youth—outside perhaps a few religious groups—no longer talk of homosexuality in terms of depravity and corruption. And the psychiatrist’s charge of arrested development weighs comparatively lightly upon such variants as are fairly well adjusted to their condition.

* * *

Factors other than the scientific have also affected this century’s output of literature dealing with variant women. Until the beginning of World War I, the Woman’s Movement figured sporadically in fiction, but not in variant novels after 1900. As a force in practical politics, however,—sometimes, as in England, a very noisy one—it had by the end of the war won the suffrage battle throughout much of the western world. Even where this end was not achieved, the movement widened women’s educational and occupational opportunities, and thus tended to multiply the total number of feminine authors. Next, the war opened a number of men’s jobs to women, increased their financial and personal independence, and encouraged tendencies toward masculine simplicity in dress. It also brought about that relaxation of sexual standards in general for which the 1920s have become notorious. Taken together, these alterations in women’s status are held by some social historians to have increased female variance. Certainly what may be called a first peak in variant literature was reached between 1925 and 1935.

Thus, it is not surprising to discover that during the first third of the present century, literary titles dealing with variant women averaged more than one per year, that at least half were written by women, and that a majority were more favorable to variance than otherwise.

Poetry—French

Since the discussion of conjecturally variant women closed with a consideration of lyric poetry, the same literary thread will be traced first in the twentieth-century pattern. More than a dozen poets have celebrated love between women, three-quarters of them feminine and all but two sympathetic. The earliest were two expatriates who adopted Paris as their residence and wrote almost exclusively in French.

The lesser, from a literary viewpoint, was Natalie Clifford Barney, an American with New York and Bar Harbor background who was able to live independently in Paris and to maintain her own yacht. Born in 1877, she had by the late nineties made contact with Pierre Louÿs, and she introduced to him her British-American friend, Pauline Tarn. Both young women were enthusiastic about Louÿs’s Songs of Bilitis, and seeing in him ‘the champion of the young girls of the future,’ they submitted manuscripts for his judgment. They found him more inclined to admire “jeux latins et voluptés grecques” than the “exaggerated preoccupations” of femmes damnées whose sense of sin he suspected of giving an edge to their passions. He pronounced Barney’s novel, Lettres à Une Connue, unsuited for publication because of its outmoded poetic diction, but concerning Tarn’s verses, which he praised, he afterward wrote to Barney: ‘You must write your story and hers. It is the indispensable first chapter to your complete romance.’[6] The implication of some previous emotional connection between the two is supported by evidence in the poetry of both.

Barney was a Maupin type, with ‘a fencer’s grace noticeable in an all-too-feminine Paris; moonlight-blonde hair, blue eyes with a glint of steel, made to observe and not (like most women’s) to be gazed into; white gowns and a cape of ermine’—a composite description from later articles by her fellow authors “Aurel” and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, quoted by Barney herself in her Aventures de l’Esprit.[7] In the garden of her luxurious Paris residence she built a Temple of Friendship and welcomed there many of the literary personalities of the day, evidently in conscious imitation of certain esoteric groups of the eighteenth century. Though many men were admitted, it was recognized that this was an Amazonian cult dedicated primarily to women. In her Chart of the Realm of Friendship she placed Remy de Gourmont first and Renée Vivien (Pauline Tarn) second.

Barney’s literary output was comparatively meager, perhaps because she did not care to publish too tangible evidence of her emotional bent. The complete record of publication is as follows: Quelques Sonnets et Portraits de Femmes (1900), described by critics as sensuous poems of restrained passion; The Woman who Lives with Me—possibly a version in English of the novel Louÿs criticized—listed without date as a “roman abrégé, hors commerce”; Cinq Petits Dialogues Grecs, printed in the periodical La Plume, 1901; The City of the Flowers, “poème avec enlumières, à un seul exemplaire”; Actes et Entr’actes, 1910; Poèmes—Autres Alliances, 1920; Pensées d’une Amazone, and Aventures de l’Esprit, 1929, both in prose.

She is probably best remembered in French letters for having inspired two volumes by Remy de Gourmont, Lettres à l’Amazone, essays which first ran serially in the Mercure de France and were translated into English by Richard Aldington (1931), and Lettres Intimes à l’Amazone, 1927.[8] The first volume, comparatively impersonal, includes considerable analysis of Barney’s temperament, which has ‘the superiority of a profoundly pagan spirit, determined to obey Nature only in so far as it gives its consent.’ This, Gourmont says, is ‘so different from ... Christian morality that ... some courage is needed to express it so openly and so strongly.’ He defines as “chaste” any action prompted by Love rather than by what Verlaine calls ‘the obscene mechanism,’ and observes that women, who feel passion only when they love, are spared men’s bondage to ‘that tyrant, sexual need.’ He says that l’Amazone sets out to conquer without coquetry or any other passive or impulsive feminine motivation, and he judges her self-willed and egotistic.[9] Both he and the feminine commentators mentioned above, picture Barney as merciless in her intellectual judgments, wanting in tenderness, impatient of men, and scornful of all who abandon themselves to their emotions.

Despite Gourmont’s analytic clarity, in the Lettres Intimes we find the spontaneous record of what he terms “une amitié violente,” springing from Barney’s being not only “une amie mais un ami.” His volume includes a good bit of his own verse, “des poésies sapphiques” about two women of ancient Greece written earlier but not previously published, and several poems to Barney herself, whom he describes as “un page et une femme ... Natalie qui aimes tes soeurs et tes pareilles, Plus que toi même, et plus que tout, l’Amour ... Natalie préférant bure et cuire à la soie, Natalie souriante au bord de la géhenne.”[10]

His friendship with Barney began in 1910 and drifted along less and less satisfactorily for three years. By 1913 Gourmont betrays continual distress because she is so often absent, traveling with “une amie” and leaving no address, since most of the time, she and the friend are on the yacht he had helped her to procure. He owns to a resentment which surprises him, and implies that had he been able to divine her temperament at the outset he would not have permitted himself to become so involved. Yet we have here a close copy of the situation he himself had analyzed so clearly a dozen years before in Un Songe de Femme. There could be no stronger testimonial to the truth of Proust’s later contention that each individual follows repeatedly a compulsive emotional pattern, and does not profit by experience. Nor could there be a better picture of the difficulty the two sexes experience in mutual comprehension, even when both parties are psychologically so close to the intersexual borderline and have so many interests in common.

Barney’s Aventures de l’Esprit record primarily her association with the more or less notable literary figures of her day, and the judgments expressed are clear-headed and relatively merciless. Actes et Entr’actes, the only other volume available for examination, consists of four poetic dramas ranging from twenty-five to seventy pages each, and a dozen or so lyrics. One of the dramas, “Equivoque,” was presented in her garden in 1906 with the film star, Marguérite Moréno, in the leading role of Sappho. It represents Sappho’s death as resulting not from love of Phaon but from the loss of a beloved girl, Timas, who marries Phaon but subsequently, disgusted by her wedding night and overwhelmed by nostalgia for her great earlier love, follows Sappho to death in the sea.

Two of the lyrics, “Virelai Nouveau” and “Filles,” represent the poet as following young filles de joie on their twilight strolls and taking a man’s sensual pleasure in their consciously seductive beauty, but the enjoyment is detached, that of the voyeur only. “Couple,” however, explicitly champions variance in its description of a loving pair:

(Compare Peladan’s Tammuz the sun god.)

In three short “Paroles de Maîtresses” she depicts well the misery of a woman awaiting passively the pleasure of a male lover. In a dozen “Paroles d’Amants,” she pictures and rejoices in a man’s more active pursuit, even though painful, of the dream and illusion of love, “sublime, immense et limité.”

“Te Deum” expresses the same satisfaction:

A “Quatrain” sums up the debit side of her resolute assumption of masculinity:

There remain a group of poems addressed to Renée Vivien, published after the latter’s death, which will be mentioned later.

* * *

Of greater literary importance is Renée Vivien, whose poetry has been pronounced most perfect in form of any French verse written in the first quarter of the century, and this quality is the more remarkable in that her native language was not French but English. As she died at thirty-two, its quantity also deserves mention, for her collected poems run to five hundred pages; besides she produced two volumes of “prose-poems” which a decade later would have been called free verse, a prose satire, and an autobiographical novel. In addition she and a friend collaborated on a number of similar volumes of verse and personal narrative under the pseudonym of Paule Riversdale. As originally published her work appeared in this order: Études et Préludes, 1901; Cendres et Poussières, 1902; Evocations, Sappho, and La Vénus des Aveugles, 1903; Kitharèdes, 1904; A l’Heure des Mains Joints, 1906; Sillages and Flambeaux Éteints, 1908; and posthumously in 1910, Dans un Coin de Violettes, Le Vent des Vaisseaux, and Haillons. Prose-poems: Brumes de Fjords, 1902, and Du Vert au Violet, 1903; La Dame à la Louve (a collection of short stories), Le Christ, Aphrodite et M. Pépin (satire), and Une Femme M’Apparut, (novel), 1904.

Vivien was more openly lesbian than any woman so far encountered, but the few selections and biographical notes found in anthologies are careful to conceal this fact, and since further text and comment are not readily available in this country, she will be discussed here at some length. Almost the only sustained account of her personal life is included in a critical volume by her good friend André Germain; however, as it was published in 1917 when most of the persons concerned were still living, it omitted all personal names and many details of the poet’s troubled history. Her publisher and friend, Edward Sansot, has attested that all her work was autobiographical in its inspiration, and so from internal evidence and scattered fact it is possible to supplement Germain’s picture.

She was born (1877) Pauline Tarn, daughter of a Michigan heiress and an English gentleman of a Kentish family distinguished in law and the church. The girl was born in Hawaii and spent her first dozen years in travel, in French and German schools, and in Paris. From the fragmentary accounts one infers a background to equal any of Henry James’s pictures of international marriage and difficult childhood. Between twelve and sixteen she was happy for a time with another English girl housed in the same Paris hôtel, whom she met through the intimacy of their respective governesses. Violet Shilleto was already a precocious mystic whose concern with “the meaning of life” made a lasting impression on her young companion. No shadow seems to have fallen on their passionate friendship before Pauline was removed to England at sixteen.

There for several years Pauline underwent conventional preparations for debut and marriage, including presentation in the Queen’s drawing room. On this occasion she is described as a tall slim girl with delicate features, a luminous halo of fair hair, and eyes of “brun doré,” which court gown lent her the air of a “princesse de légende.”[15] But the demure exterior concealed rebellion. She was still nostalgic for Paris and Violet. The stuffy formality of social life in Chislehurst smothered her. Above all she was revolted by “coquetry” and the prospect of marriage. All this she poured out in letters to Violet, and the interception of certain of these produced an uproar of which Germain says that her later poem, “Sous la Rafale,” is not an exaggerated picture:

According to Germain’s implications and evidence in her poetry, her relations with Violet, like those of Lamartine’s Regina with Clothilde, were essentially innocent. But if her letters matched her subsequent verses to Violet in loving eloquence, they would scarcely have sounded innocent to conventional Britons in whose ears the Wilde scandal still reverberated. It is certainly from this same experience that “Le Pilori” grew, for the two poems are unique among her collected verse:

Whatever actually happened, peace seems to have ensued only with her attaining her majority and returning to Paris, where she lived alone save for a formal companion. She was obviously wealthy in her own right, for within a few years she acquired residences in Paris, Nice, and Mitylene, the first of which became legendary for its treasures of antique and oriental art, and to the end of her days she was an inveterate traveler.

At the outset of Pauline’s Parisian life, drunk with her new freedom and the means to enjoy it, she found her old friend Violet too serious for her mood, and some sort of “puerile” misunderstanding occurred. Through Violet, however, she had met a ‘fellow-exile and nascent poet’ who was undoubtedly Natalie Clifford Barney. Her new friend introduced her to Sappho, as yet unknown to her. Until now, says Germain, she had been a jeune fille, ‘doubly unawakened either as poet or as woman.’ The new contact proved a double revelation, as well it might. Here was a beautiful sophisticate whose poetic gifts and interests, worldly resources, and emotional tastes matched her own; here, too, at last, was the great classical poet who glorified those tastes. In order to know Sappho better she set herself to learn Greek, and in her ‘passionate fervor’ mastered it “avec une facilité qui stupéfiait ses professeurs.” She and Barney lived together, and it must have been during these years between 1898 and 1900 that she acquired the villa above Mitylene where intermittently “for months at a time she attempted to recapture the golden age of Sappho.”[18] We know from Gourmont’s account that both young women were writing poetry, and as soon as she considered publication (possibly even earlier) Pauline adopted the new name under which thereafter she lived as well as wrote—Renée Vivien, suggesting a radiant rebirth.

Two poems published in the same volume with those already quoted convey her exaltation at this time better than any account of them can do. One was “Ainsi Je Parlerai:”

Far from being the mere defiant sacrilege this seemed to some readers, it was the confession of a new faith to replace the one in whose name England had damned her. In its entirety, much too long to quote, the poem is also an apologia for her first love so slandered by her “persecutors.” She elaborated her creed in “Psappha Revit,” among whose fourteen quatrains appear such lines as these:

Of this faith from then on she was the dedicated priestess.

Inevitably her attainment of the Golden Age was imperfect. Her poems are full of evidence that from the start her second love was not too happy, as exemplified by the following:

These carry no record of “désir moins fort que la tendresse,” nor indeed of tenderness at all in the poet’s cold blonde partner. But it is not difficult to understand the two girls’ basic incompatibility. Barney’s refusal of self-surrender, her contempt for abandon in others, were aspects of a resolute masculinity. Vivien, by nature feminine and romantic, needed to give herself wholly and to be cherished in return. An apparently love-starved childhood and an antipathy to everything male sharpened her hunger for a feminine response. Nothing less than the initial experience of passion, induced by beauty and blessed by Sappho, could have bound her to Barney at all.

In 1900 the spell that held her was broken by tragedy. Early in that year Violet Shilleto fell into acute depression, “finding her intellectual mysticism empty” and doubtless also wounded by the loss of the intimate friendship, and in the autumn she secretly joined the Catholic church. Whether spiritual conflict undermined her health or whether incipient tuberculosis precipitated the religious crisis, she fell ill and was ordered to winter in Cannes. Vivien promised to visit her there, but was too deeply entangled in her own affairs to sense the gravity of the other girl’s condition. She seems instead to have made a trip to America. When at last she responded to an urgent summons, it was too late—her friend was dead before Vivien reached her.

Vivien’s grief and remorse were shattering. The fact that Violet was given a “cold” Anglican funeral and interred beneath a church in the Avenue de l’Alma instead of under clean earth and sky increased the poet’s agony, and “for a long time she spent hours each day at dusk” in the subterranean gloom beside Violet’s grave. This state of affairs quite naturally moved Barney, who was nothing if not proud, to accuse her of being more in love with Love than with reality, and to depart for a protracted stay in the States. Thus Vivien was left doubly deserted, and from this period stem many poems in her early volumes. In Cendres et Poussières (1902) we find “Devant la Mort d’une Amie Véritablement Aimée”:

And in Études et Préludes (1901):

In Evocations (1903) she is proclaiming a “Victoire Funèbre:”

The contrast between these devoted elegies and the poems to her second love is striking, and one is aware of a revolt against passion per se. For the first time the poet voices a longing for death which recurred with increasing frequency in her later work.

Completely sobered by her double loss, Vivien seems to have spent some part of 1901 in Scotland with her family. On her return to Paris she leased the large residence which had housed her and Violet during their early association, and made it her permanent home. Here she must have worked on the three volumes which appeared in 1902 and on the translation of Sappho which was among those of 1903. This last and Kitharèdes (renderings into French of all fragments from the Greek Anthology written by or about women) were lauded by critics both as translations and as poetry, the only adverse comment being that they were so much wordier than the originals. What she apparently attempted, however, was to expand fragments into plausible wholes, as many other translators have done before and since (cf. especially Marion Mills Miller).

The year 1902, says Germain, was probably the calmest of her life. She was suffering from disillusion as to her own powers of emotional constancy, and believed that the serious loves of her life lay behind her. If in mid-twentieth century this sounds adolescent in a young woman of twenty-five, one must remember that in the English-speaking countries the emotional ideal popularly given lip service at the turn of the century was still “One Great Love in a Life.” For a year she strove for emotional quiescence, but there are signs even in Evocations (1902) of encounter with a new personality: