Sex variant women in literature

Before 1914

If variant poetry burgeoned suddenly with the turn of the present century, new developments in fiction were equally apparent. Between 1900 and 1950, novels with female variance as either a central or a major theme averaged more than two per year. A rather larger additional group used variance as a minor motif or in a telling incident or two. Of this generous crop a good half was the work of English and American authors; an equal proportion was written by women; and although active championship of lesbianism or variance was comparatively rare, better than half the fictional presentations were either sympathetic or neutral. These counts are based upon a hundred-odd volumes available for examination, plus an additional score or so of unequivocal reviews.

The new century’s characteristic changes were least evident in France, where for a couple of decades variant fiction had appeared in quantity, and where at least two or three women (Rachilde, Jane de LaVaudère, Camille Pert) had contributed. We have seen that Pierre Louÿs between 1896 and 1901 even struck a new note of cheerful insouciance, but his Aphrodite and Bilitis pictured courtesans of the classical era, and the adventures of his three girls in King Pausole were set in a zany fantasy well removed from reality.

From reviews and publishers’ records we know that during the century’s first decade fully as many inferior lesbian novels appeared as in the one preceding, a few of which will be mentioned later. The outstanding work, however, was that done by the couple signing themselves Colette-Willy, who opened a new era by portraying their own times with both frankness and sympathy. Willy was the established music critic and light novelist Henry Gauthier-Villars. Sidonie Gabrielle Colette has since been recognized as the foremost French woman writer of her time, but in 1900 she was merely a piquant personality who, a decade earlier, at seventeen, had come to Paris from the provinces and married Gauthier-Villars. Consequently, when Claudine à L’Ecole appeared (1900), it was taken to be mainly a work of Willy based upon his wife’s girlhood experiences. Critics have since established that it and its three successors, Claudine à Paris (1901), Claudine en Ménage (1902) and Claudine s’en Va (1903) were less his than Colette’s own, and the fifth volume, La Retraite Sentimentale (1907) was recognized at the time of its appearance as hers, since by then she had separated from her husband. The first four of the series have been translated as Claudine at School, Young Lady of Paris, The Indulgent Husband, and Innocent Wife, and are fairly well-known.

This series presents the emotional history of the delightful Claudine between the ages of fifteen and thirty, and incidentally incorporates the authors’ opinions upon many sorts of sexual relation. Claudine appears first as a day pupil in a provincial public school somewhere in the mountainous départements of southern France. Motherless, she is brought up after a fashion by a father so absorbed in his studies as to approach a caricature of the absent-minded professor, and by a free-tongued servant comparable to Proust’s Françoise. She grows up a tomboy, free to climb trees, to roam alone over the wooded hills about her small town, and to read at will in her father’s uncensored library.

Her emotional development begins with an attraction appropriate to her years (fifteen) but uncommonly intense, to a pretty assistant mistress, Mademoiselle Aimée. With Claudine’s wily arrangement to be tutored in English at home, this affair promises to develop richly, but it is interrupted when the headmistress, a domineering redhead, also contracts a passion for her assistant. Knowing on which side her bread is buttered, Aimée abandons Claudine, to become the pampered darling of her superior. Two or three of the “big girls” understand perfectly what is going on, and Claudine even eavesdrops one day upon an intimate moment enjoyed by the two women in their dormitory quarters while their classes run wild in the schoolrooms below. Later, the headmistress implies to Claudine that had she not from the outset shown antagonism, her affection might have been bestowed on her rather than on the somewhat insipid junior mistress.

In the course of the year, Claudine discovers that she is becoming attractive to men, notably the school’s visiting physician, a “wolf” at whom she laughs although he has an irritating power to move her. He uses his political influence to the end of enjoying Aimée’s favors, an affair to which the older mistress appears indifferent, her jealousy being reserved for feminine rivals. A second diversion develops when Aimée’s young sister, Luce, enters at mid-term as a charity pupil and is badly neglected by the two mistresses. A year Claudine’s junior, this thin green-eyed youngster becomes her adoring slave, constantly manoeuvering for caresses, but receiving only blows, which she appears to find almost as satisfying. To herself, Claudine admits that, were the girl anyone but a sister to the fickle Aimée, the affair might go farther.

At the graduation dance—a neat bit of satire on provincial entertainment—Claudine is much sought after by local and visiting swains, and analyzes afterward why she found their attentions so unsatisfactory. She contemplates what she wants of love:

This précis of the feminine ideal marks the beginning of Colette’s since-famous dissection of women’s emotional psychology.

The second volume carries Claudine through the year—her seventeenth—which her father decides must be spent in Paris, ostensibly in the interests of his scientific work, but actually with an eye to widening her circle of acquaintance. Sick with nostalgia for her native Montigny and loathing every aspect of her urban imprisonment, Claudine succumbs to a long illness which has two important results. Her hair must be cropped, and her contacts are confined to her father’s older sister and the latter’s grandson, a pretty creature of her own age as effeminate as she is boyish. Very nearly disliking Marcel, Claudine still feels a physical attraction much like that which drew her to Luce. But Marcel’s emotions are absorbed in an affair with a male schoolmate—an affair which has made trouble for both boys at their Lycée and evoked the wrath and contempt of Marcel’s father. Evasive about his own experiences, Marcel is avidly curious about Claudine’s relations with Luce (pride prevents her mentioning Aimée). It is Marcel who sees the modish possibilities in Claudine’s cropped head, and takes her to an English tailor to be outfitted en garçonne, a style eminently suited to her both physically and psychologically.

During her illness Claudine has heard from Luce that her situation at the school has become intolerable and she is ready for desperate measures. Presently she meets Luce on a Paris street dressed more smartly than she is herself, and learns that the girl, who had sought help from an uncle (a gross sixty-year-old widower), is now being lavishly kept by him. Nevertheless, Luce manages to have a boy-friend from the Beaux-Arts on the side, and is also eager to resume relations with Claudine. The latter, too, feels the earlier attraction, but realizes she cannot tolerate intimacy with a little grue who is living with her own uncle. With humorous honesty she admits to herself that despite having “read everything—and understood it” before she was sixteen, when it comes to “real life” she is nothing but “an ordinary good girl.”

In the course of her acquaintance with the pretty Marcel she meets Renaud, the latter’s widowed father, and is drawn to him despite his intolerance of his son’s homosexual affair. She thinks he is just the man she would have chosen for a father—urbane and witty, but with sombre emotional depths. Soon she is in love with him. The man, twenty years her senior, struggles against a reciprocal attraction, but Claudine’s headlong infatuation wins, and the book ends with their engagement.

The first section of Claudine en Ménage analyzes with skill her as yet incomplete marital adjustment. She resents the memory of her elaborate wedding and her husband’s continuing mixture of fatherly indulgence and experienced sensuality which shames her adoring naïveté. The couple have spent a year in continental travel uncongenial to the Montigny tomboy, and as she settles in Renaud’s Paris apartment she is homesick for her native province and rebellious against the routine of sophisticated entertaining her husband wishes to resume.

Accepting life on his terms with what grace she can, she presently meets Rezi, a seductive Austrian, wife of a retired English officer, and soon they are mutually infatuated. Their emotion can find no outlet because the colonel’s jealous surveillance and the unremitting social activity in her own household afford them no privacy. After a period of increasingly painful frustration Claudine appeals to her husband for aid. Renaud has all along shown the same excited interest in this affair that his son exhibited in her relations with Luce, and he readily agrees to find the pair a private haven. He insists, however, on retaining the key to their “nest” himself and on escorting them to it whenever they wish to go there. This complaisance bordering on voyeurism offends Claudine, who is at heart wounded by his lack of jealousy. Gradually she realizes that what she feels for Rezi is mere infatuation. She suspects that her partner has been intimate with other women about whom she is evasive, and she even finds reason to wonder whether before her marriage Renaud and Rezi might not have had an affair. Her brooding discontent increases during three weeks of illness when she can keep watch on neither husband nor friend, and comes to a head on the day when she pays a surprise visit to the “nest” and finds the two there together. In a fury of jealousy and disillusionment she goes home to Montigny.

There, healed by springtime in the country, she owns that she is still as much in love with Renaud as his letters show him to be with her. She finally writes him that he has been too indulgent, too like a doting father. ‘I wanted Rezi and you gave her to me like a bonbon. You should have explained that there are sweets one cannot eat without becoming ill.’[2] She tells him that if they are to be happy she must be more his equal as he must be more her master. Life seems to her so much more sane and wholesome in the country that she is determined to stay there, and she hopes he will consent to make his permanent home there as well. When business or even pleasure call him to Paris, she will let him go, knowing that when he returns it will be from genuine inclination. The volume closes with this ultimatum without disclosing Renaud’s response.

In Claudine s’en Va the viewpoint shifts to that of a very different young married woman, but Claudine, moving in and out of the picture, is still a dominant influence in the story. Its central figure, Annie, is a submissive creature who has been married four years to Alain, an autocratic cousin whom she has adored slavishly since childhood. While he is absent on a protracted business trip Annie discovers herself—her uninfluenced personality is very different from her husband’s, and her married life has been a one-sided affair never affording her real satisfaction. The latter revelation is the fruit of long talks with Claudine, whose own marriage, now radiantly successful, becomes for Annie the embodiment of what mutual love should be. Her husband has forbidden her to associate with Renaud and Claudine, whom he considers too “fast” to be a good influence, but Annie learns that the sister to whose care he has entrusted her is involved in a sordid affair with an alcoholic journalist and that Alain himself has, since their marriage, carried on a long liaison with a woman who has always disgusted her. This painful enlightenment comes during a hectic season at an international spa. She turns more and more to the bohemian but wholesome Claudine, who convinces her that a middle course is possible between the looseness into which she has been so quickly plunged and the rigid conventionality of her former life. As their intimacy grows it becomes apparent that Claudine is strongly drawn to her but is as strongly self-disciplined. At one point when they have been exchanging confidences and Annie rests her head on Claudine’s shoulder, hungry for tenderness, Claudine springs up crying “Not too far! In another instant I would—and I’ve promised Renaud——”[3]

Annie finally feels that further life with her husband is impossible, and she prepares to leave on a secret quest for emotional orientation before his return. In bidding her goodbye and godspeed, Claudine confesses that she could easily have become emotionally involved, but dared not risk a second experience like the one with Rezi. She must abide by her promise to her husband, even though because of the different circumstances, she, herself, can see no harm in giving what comfort she might to the suffering Annie. Her final words are almost mystical—a confession of faith in Love as something precious enough to seek at all costs, and when found, to preserve at any price.

La Retraite Sentimentale, appearing in 1907 after Colette’s divorce from Willy, carries Claudine’s story to its conclusion. At the outset Renaud is in a Swiss sanitorium, exhausted by the hectic pace at which he has lived, and Claudine is with the now-divorced Annie on the latter’s Burgundian estate, in order to spare Renaud the jealous concern her life alone in Paris might occasion. The potential attraction between Annie and herself is dormant, and Claudine, wretchedly lonely without her husband, amuses herself by drawing from her companion a full account of her Wanderjahr. She learns that Annie has run the gamut of sexual experiment with men in search of her romantic ideal, but has gained nothing beyond momentary appeasement. More unwilling than ever to risk a further barren experience with Annie, Claudine yields to a fantastic impulse. Her woman-shy stepson, Marcel, arrives for a visit just as Annie feels impelled to set out on another sexual quest, and Claudine throws the two together in the hope that each may solve the other’s problem. The tragi-farcical outcome suggests that this episode may have been plotted during Colette’s collaboration with Willy, for it echoes the most cynical note of the earlier volumes.

The concluding portion of La Retraite Sentimentale shows Claudine, now thirty and widowed, once more entrenched in her beloved country house in Montigny. Her father and the old servant have died, and she is alone with her cherished dogs and cats, still faithful in spirit to Renaud, and filled with tolerant pity for the restless Parisians (Annie among them) who often motor down to see her. This final volume has no place in a study of female variance save for its picture of Claudine’s resolute refusal in maturity to become involved with Annie.

As has been said, all of the volumes are now recognized as chiefly the work of Colette, and also as more autobiographical than could be admitted at the time of their composition. They may, therefore, be trusted as giving a fairly accurate picture of a certain group of Parisian literati at the turn of the century. There is something of Willy in the idealized Renaud and also in the caricatured Maugis, alcoholic music critic and paramour of Annie’s sister-in-law. Judging Willy’s attitude from that found in his independent fiction, the complaisance of Renaud toward his wife’s lesbian liaison was less improbable than certain contemporary critics—Rachilde among them—felt it to be. From passing references in Colette’s much later volume of personal reminiscences, Ces Plaisirs,[4] it would appear that the group in which she moved during her early married years—that is, the middle and late Nineties—were tolerant of male as well as female homosexuality, and Marcel’s affairs were probably drawn from life. Colette’s divorce after twelve years of marriage, however, is said to have been due to heterosexual irregularities on her husband’s part. A second marriage in 1914 to Henri de Jouvenel, by whom she had a daughter, seems to have brought her a more settled happiness. But it should be noted that Stella Browne, in a psychological study of some women authors with homosexual tendencies,[5] mentions Colette as having been involved herself before 1914 in two powerful variant attachments, one with the film star, Marguérite Moréno, whom she met while she was earning her living on the stage between her two marriages, and the other with an unnamed foreign noblewoman. Character sketches of both these women, naturally drawn with great discretion, appear in Ces Plaisirs. From them one gathers that Colette’s relations with Moréno were intimate, but “the Chevalier” (the nickname perhaps an echo from Peladan’s chaste lady) is presented as a romantic idealist unwilling or unable to cross the boundaries of physical intimacy with anyone.

To return to Claudine, she has some masculine secondary characteristics—she is proud of her boyish height and acrobatic abilities—and a personality in which unfeminine traits were emphasized by her freedom and independence while young. But she never rebels against the feminine role. She is also proud of her beautiful hair and eyes, and she never abandons skirts even on her strenuous cross-country rambles. She enjoys her power to attract men, though she scorns flirtation and breaks an umbrella on a boulevardier who risks the traditional continental pinch. Her reaction to the women who attract her is definitely male—primarily physical, roused by beauty and passivity, and manifesting itself in a desire to conquer and dominate. It contrasts sharply with the clinging adoration of Luce, Aimée, and Annie. It is most often stirred, after the initial “crush” on Aimée, by girls younger than herself, those who recall her own youth or the masochistic devotion of young Luce. This is particularly stressed in the early pages of Claudine en Ménage, when, taking Renaud on a visit to her old school, she finds there a handful of delicious adolescents spending their holidays in the dormitory, and plays recklessly with them. It appears again in Claudine s’en Va, when she encounters at the spa an impudent comedienne so much like herself a few years earlier as to provoke universal comment on the resemblance. This young woman, Polaire, was a real not a fictional character who had acted in a dramatic version of Claudine à Paris in 1903, and who appears in the story under her own name, as do various other contemporary personalities in the course of the five volumes. (A particularly malicious sketch of Mme. Dieulafoy, whose opera Sémiramis had just been presented, figures in Claudine s’en Va in a letter from the music critic Maugis.)[6]

Taken together, the five Claudine novels present a complete sexual philosophy. It is Claudine’s progressive maturing under the influence of Renaud which weans her away from her variant leanings, but the influence is not one-sided. As their marital relationship deepens and mellows, Renaud is led to “love Love,” to be, as Claudine puts it, more “chaste,” less fond of sensual virtuosity “qui s’aide d’une combinaison de miroirs ... et de mots fait pour le chuchotement et qu’on se force à crier à haute voix, tout crus.”[7] In short, he has acquired a more feminine outlook. Here, in brief, is the distilled wisdom of the woman pronounced a genius in portraying the nuances of feminine psychology. Lesbian attractions are legitimate but they belong to youth. Mature love is neither uninhibited sophistication nor romantic idealism, but a mutual devotion in whose interest each sex must sacrifice something and must attempt to acquire some part of the other’s outlook. It has taken four decades of Freud and his successors to produce the almost identical wisdom which appears in all the better marriage manuals one reads today. One might say that although France did not contribute so much as Germany and England to the scientific study of sex, her long years of frank attention to it from the personal and literary angles bore fruit before the scientists’ harvest.

The Claudine series spanned seven years, but they were not the only works of their genre to appear in France. In the matter of public acclaim, perhaps the most important item was an opera, Astarte, presented by the Académie Nationale de Musique on February 15, 1901, with a score by Xavier Leroux, which critics characterized as Wagnerian, and a five-act libretto by Louis de Gramont. (It is cited in Martens’s Book of Operas as Omphale, and was apparently composed in 1891, though there is no record of a dramatic performance before 1901.) The libretto has not been available, and the following account is drawn from the review by Breville in the Mercure de France for April 1901, and the summary in Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch[8] of an article in Le Temps for February 20, by Pierre Lalo. The drama combines two episodes from the mythological cycle of Hercules: his bewitched assumption of woman’s dress and his death caused by the shirt of Nessus. Hercules is represented as going to Lydia to stamp out the infamous lesbian cult of Astarte by slaying Omphale, its high priestess. Instead, he is reduced by her seduction to abject slavery, forgetting all his previous triumphs and the purpose of his quest. Shedding his warlike accoutrements and ‘using the skin of the Nemean lion for a bedside carpet,’ he watches with fascination a lesbian ceremony which Breville pronounces one of the most beautiful ballets ever presented on the stage, ‘consecrated not so much to those amours animales of which Verlaine speaks as to the harmonious disposition of groups and colors,’ its erotic climax being veiled in ‘suddenly imposed shadows.’

At the ballet’s end Hercules is willing to abjure Vesta, adopt the religion of Astarte, and enter into the marriage with Omphale urged by the high priest. But Omphale, at last enamoured of a man, demurs because she knows that the sequel to the nuptials must be the sacrifice of Hercules on Astarte’s altar. At this point, the maiden Iole appears bringing the miraculous tunic of Nessus from Hercules’s wife, Dejanira. This tunic supposedly will save him from the power of Astarte and rekindle the flame of legitimate love. The charms of Iole so transcend those of Hercules in the eyes of Omphale that she offers to release him and his warriors if she may keep the girl. Hercules, “toujours naïf,” accepts the bargain, dons the tunic, and bursts into flame, igniting temple and palace as well. Omphale, undisturbed either by his dying cries or the general conflagration, embarks for Lesbos with the enraptured Iole amid the ritual chants and dancing of all the women.

Breville, who finds Leroux’s score worthy of serious attention, is fairly scornful of Gramont’s book. Here, he says, Hercules is not a mythical hero but a robust swashbuckler who stalks about like the professional wrestler paid to let an amateur win the bout. Amorous psychology, he feels, has given way to mere physiology; Omphale’s sudden preference for Iole is unconvincing, and moralists have no real case against a work which ends in barren triumph for the purely sensual. Despite this negative judgment the opera must have survived at least from February till April, which suggests that Breville’s opinion was prejudiced.

In the same year a popular star of music hall and demi-monde, Liane de Pougy, published a novel, Idylle Saphique. Rachilde in the Mercure pronounced it well-written but omitted comment on its theme, evidently thinking the title sufficiently obvious. She confined herself to lamenting that the author seemed on her way to becoming a respectable woman (honnête), ‘and what is worse, a bluestocking.’[9] The Jahrbuch, which repeatedly deplored the French tendency to regard homosexuality as an experience possible for anyone, rather than the innate tendency which that journal’s sponsors championed, considered the Idylle psychologically sound, and gave an extensive résumé of the plot,[10] which seems representative enough of the sensational variant novels of the time to merit review here. Annhine de Lys, famous Parisian courtisane, differs from most of her class in dreaming of a great love. Her profitable life with a millionaire or two has sickened her of both luxury and sex, so that when a twenty-year-old American falls in love with her she is moved by the girl’s intense worship. She herself has hitherto avoided ‘lesbian degeneracy,’ and continues to resist it in its completeness, having been warned by a colleague that it wrecks the nerves.

Florence, the American, is engaged to a fellow countryman, who, like Claudine’s husband, has not objected to several variant experiments on her part, but of her passion for Annhine he is jealous for the first time. He purchases Annhine’s favors at a fabulous price, thinking thus to disgust his fiancée with her adored, but instead she turns against him. When a previous love of Florence’s, realizing that she too has lost the girl, stabs herself in the presence of the current pair, Annhine falls ill from shock and leaves Paris. But some months in Italy and Spain and a romantic interlude with a young man do not serve to eradicate her memories of Florence, and the two are finally reunited. Annhine sells her Paris mansion because it has been the scene of professional liaisons which now seem shameful to her, and she and Florence plan a “marriage” and a future of constancy and happiness. But the other courtesan’s prediction proves correct: Annhine suffers a breakdown, and Florence plans to marry the ever-devoted American suitor in order to support her love. Annhine, knowing herself doomed, begs the girl to enter the marriage seriously and give up lesbian practices, but after her death Florence merely cancels her engagement a second time and goes her way alone. Interestingly enough, the reviewer in the Jahrbuch finds the suitor a wholly incredible character, and believes only an American could be so casually tolerant. Yet the review of Claudine en Ménage follows immediately in the same number of the journal, with no editorial comment on the parallel situations in the two.

In the following year (1902) a novel of less artistry voiced strong disapproval of lesbianism. Charles Montfont’s Journal d’une Saphiste is an autobiography which follows Aline from her first boarding school initiation at the age of ten into her middle twenties. Her second love, beginning in adolescence, is for the delicate and feminine Mirette, an orphan who spends vacations in her home. Since Aline is motherless and her father without suspicion, the two girls enjoy a protracted affair until the father arranges a marriage for Aline. Her husband, alerted by her docile frigidity and by watching her with her friend, tells her she must choose between them. She chooses Mirette. Her father dies financially ruined, and as her ex-husband will understandably enough contribute nothing to her support, she is obliged to keep herself and her love by selling herself secretly to one of her husband’s friends. Mirette senses the truth, and, already weakened by passionate excesses, dies in raving delirium. Aline ends her diary with an exhortation: ‘Women, seek only the love that all mankind honors, the healthy and honorable, because fertile, love of men,’ and leaves the document to a friend as a warning to all girls and schoolmistresses against ‘the extravagant madness of lesbian love.’ The implication is that she then commits suicide. The entire book, while using moral tags at beginning and end to placate the censor, is written with detail bordering on pornography, and Mirette’s death is as much medical nonsense as was Annhine’s mentioned above, or Mlle Giraud’s from meningitis.

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As was said earlier, the dozen years before World War I produced as many variant novels of diverse quality as appeared in the 1890s. These ranged from Morel’s Sapho de Lesbos and Fauré’s La Derniere Journée de Sapho, both of which whitewashed their classical heroine; through Willy’s La Môme Picrate, in which the lesbian motif is incidental, and de Régnier’s L’Amour et le Plaisir, a clever imitation of eighteenth century farce; to LePage’s Les Fausse Vierges and Hoche’s Le Vice Mortel, melodramas holding lesbianism responsible for murder and suicide in improbable circumstances.[11] The only novel to rate serious consideration in both the Mercure and the Jahrbuch was Daniel Borys’s Carlotta Noll, Amoureuse et Femme de Lettres (1905).[12] In this book, the heroine’s passion for a famous male literary colleague is supplanted by infatuation for the homosexual Myrtil, who lures her into active lesbianism and introduces her to the fatal habit of inhaling ether as well. (Annie in Claudine s’en Va had a similar fondness for chloroform. Sic transeunt modes in drugs!) When Carlotta is finally abandoned by Myrtil she suffers general paralysis and ends in an institution. The book’s chief claim to critical attention seems to have been its prose style, which notably resembled that of Louÿs.

Post-War Trends

War, as always, checked the flow of fiction on any exotic themes. But Marcel Proust in his invalid’s ivory tower was steadily working on À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, which emerged intermittently from 1918 to 1926. (Swann’s Way had appeared in 1913, but it and The Guermantes Way are least pertinent to the present study, variance in the latter being confined to the male liaisons of the Baron Charlus.) One of the major factors in Proust’s long narrative is the lesbianism of its narrator’s mistress, Albertine. This is strongly foreshadowed in Within a Budding Grove; its development provides much of the narrative suspense in The Captive, and it reaches a climax in The Sweet Cheat Gone. Proust weaves the lesbian strand skillfully through his complex but controlled pattern. A sadistic episode between Mlle Vintueil and a friend figures briefly in the Combray-childhood section of Marcel’s history (which in the completed cycle precedes Swann’s Way), but this ties into the later pattern when Marcel learns that Albertine had, during adolescence, been associated with this pair of women.[13] Then comes Marcel’s obsession with the group of bold and athletic girls at the seaside resort of Balbec and his final fixation upon Albertine who was one of them;[14] his temporary separation from her while he is absorbed with the Duchesse de Guermantes and his military cousin, Robert; his later living with Albertine alone in the family town house and attempting to cut her off from all her previous feminine associates save the trusted Andrée,[15] whom he later ironically discovers to have been her lover;[16] and his final awareness that even his first love, Gilberte Swann, was associated with a nameless girl transvestist whom he had imagined to be a boy; and that Gilberte had also known Albertine’s circle.[17]

Critics are now agreed that the tapestry of female variance which Proust wove with such art was in part a transposition of the male homosexuality he did not dare to treat so openly. Perceptive readers detected this at once. Colette in Ces Plaisirs pronounced his lesbians unconvincing little monsters, and Natalie Clifford Barney in Aventures de L’Esprit writes of warning him when his early volumes appeared of the difficulty of translating the experience of one sex into terms of the other.[18] Even quite naïve readers of his work in English have been sceptical of Albertine’s freedom to visit Marcel in his hotel room late at night whenever he sent the servant Françoise to fetch her, and one could cite many similar inconsistencies with any known code of etiquette for “respectable” and marriageable girls in France or elsewhere. Thus Proust’s whole lesbian canvas is in part invalidated as a social document. But still the types he portrays, their various interconnections, and most of their psychology, ring perfectly true for any group of young female sophisticates. He was certainly well acquainted with many variants of both sexes, and one need discount his feminine data very little.

* * *

In 1922 Romain Rolland, already famous for his greatest novel, Jean Christophe, published Annette and Sylvie, the first volume of his second series, A Soul Enchanted. As Jean Christophe was the life story of a man, so the later novel presents the emotional history of a passionate woman, with her ultimate fulfillment in motherhood and devotion to a son. The first episode is an attachment between the heroine, Annette, and her illegitimate half-sister, Sylvie. The former is the daughter of a puritanic and intellectual wife, the latter of a less cultivated but more charming mistress. The progress of the girls’ intimacy after both are orphaned in their twenties is unfolded with keen insight into their contrasting natures, one serious and violent, the other self-contained and gracefully wise.

The two are drawn to one another with an intensity which Annette does not suspect as unusual. Just before its climax their love is endangered by the passing infatuation of both girls for a summer-resort Adonis, for Sylvie a mere flirtation, stimulated largely by rivalry, but for Annette a dangerous flare of passion alight for the first time in her twenty-five years. Up to this point the girls’ devotion has expressed itself only in constant companionship, endless confidences, and free but innocent caresses. In Annette’s town house they have occupied adjoining rooms. Occasionally Sylvie, a light sleeper,

After Annette’s stormy introduction to heterosexual passion, however—(“That is love?... I don’t want any more. I’m not made for it!”)—they spend some weeks together, and now

Their passion fights its way successfully through the phase of their desiring to dominate and possess one another:

The episode ends with Sylvie set up as a modiste, and Annette returning to social life in the intellectual circles her father had frequented, the two seeing one another less and less often.

The second portion of the book records Annette’s experience with a highly eligible and attractive man whom she loves deeply. He and his family, however, hold the conventional view that a wife should be completely absorbed into her husband’s life and milieu, and as this threatens her independence she breaks the engagement, though she is so moved by her lover’s desolation that she gives herself to him before parting. Unable to yield completely either to man or woman, she would today be branded as a narcissist by psychoanalysts, but in the 1920s a major artist could still present with sympathy such a quest for individual integrity.

Written in the same year and treating the same theme more obliquely was Victor Margueritte’s La Garçonne (issued in a considerably expurgated English translation in 1923 as The Bachelor Girl).[23] Monique Lerbier, a true child of her decade, gives herself to her fiancé a fortnight before her wedding, not only in token of loving trust but in an effort to be more his equal in experience and courage. Then almost on the eve of the ceremony she learns that she is merely a pawn in a business deal between her father and Lucien, and also that her fiancé has not given up a mistress of long standing nor does he intend to do so. Outraged, she breaks with both him and her family, launches herself as a decorator, and after some years of struggle achieves conspicuous success. Along with her business career she leads a complicated personal life with three or four lovers, one of them a woman, and only after much travail attains emotional stability and a happy marriage. Among the omissions from the English translation are the most explicit heterosexual scenes and all homosexual passages.

In the original French version the latter are of considerable importance. The first involves Monique and her chum Elizabeth, both sixteen. “Zabeth” has adored Monique for three years without daring to reveal her desires, which Monique for her part has never suspected. Then on a sweltering afternoon the girls slip off their blouses—one is reminded of Mlle Tantale—and fall to comparing breasts. Now Monique senses her friend’s excitement and responds, and only a chance interruption prevents her immediate initiation into the life of the senses. Nearly a decade later, when Monique has plunged feverishly into the bohemian life of Paris in the effort to forget Lucien, she and Zabeth (now married) participate in a fashionable opium party and at last consummate their long-deferred caresses.[24] Monique’s important lesbian affair, however, involves a music-hall star who is still bewitching at fifty, with whom she enjoys some months’ intimacy. It is this woman’s tactful and knowing advances which release her emotions from the ice in which the wreck of her engagement has frozen them. The two often dance together in public, are recognized at once as intimate by the male and female homosexuals who throng the dancing clubs, and suffer neither personally nor professionally from the association. It fades to a predictable end when Monique discovers that men no longer repel her. Both women then return to heterosexual associations.[25]

* * *

As in pre-war years, during this third decade variant novels of all qualities swarmed from the presses: Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe (1921-22), La Prisonnière (1924), and Albertine Disparue (1925); in 1925 also, Jacques Lacretelle’s La Bonifas and Edward Bourdet’s La Prisonnière; and scattered over the same and later years, a shower from the pen of one Charles-Etienne (an inferior disciple of Willy), and a blast from Max DesVignons as hypocritical as Montfort’s and La Vaudère’s prototypes of twenty years earlier.

Lacretelle’s novel, translated into English as Marie Bonifas in 1927, is worth special note. Its central figure is a motherless child of four or five, stocky and ugly, when her father settles in the decaying Picard hamlet of Vermont. Once thriving, the town has declined into a dreary aggregate of men like the retired Major Bonifas, unmarriageable girls, and acid gossips who spy upon each other behind half-closed shutters. This country backwater, so different from the urban setting of most variant fiction, is Marie’s lifelong home. The story covers the half century preceding World War I.

Brought up roughly by her hard drinking parent and an ill-tempered servant, Marie’s life is uneventful until a gentle country girl replaces the old shrew and becomes at once mother, playmate, and tutor. Marie blossoms as her adoring satellite, experiencing (as early as her tenth year) a sensation she thinks of as “melting” when Reine caresses her. She develops an antipathy to her father’s drunken coarseness, and resents both his attentions to Reine and the bold admiration of soldiers and country louts whom the girl attracts. This childhood idyll has a shocking end when Reine, pregnant by the Major, throws herself from a window and dies within a few hours. The curses of her peasant mother convey the essence of the tragedy, though no understanding of its details, to the terrified and prostrated child. A stronger conditioning against men could hardly be devised.

In the boarding school to which her father consigns her for the next half dozen years Marie develops her second passion for the older girl appointed as her “shepherdess.” She remains at school during vacations in order to wander the halls and garden paths she has walked with Geneviève; she violently hates the latter’s fiancé; and for another of Geneviève’s young charges she conceives such jealousy that she attacks and beats her rival and is consequently expelled. The following years from sixteen to nineteen she spends in a progressive school near the Swiss frontier. Its principal, a Parisian, has studied at Lausanne and taught abroad, and her advanced practice is to allow her girls complete freedom outside the classroom. Marie’s delight is carpentry in a shop where she spends all the hours not given to outdoor sports with her English, American and Scandinavian mates. Conscious now of her masculine build and lack of charm, she cultivates cynical indifference to romance, but her instinct rejects the feminism preached by the headmistress and her friends. Marie’s brief visits to her father are boresome, and it is only at his death that she realizes the loss of her one tie on earth.

Nostalgia recalls her to Vermont, where she establishes herself as mistress of the house, refuses the attentions of the physician who attended her father, and attempts to become a part of the town’s life. But although the soft femininity of a local aesthete makes a certain appeal, she is impatient of the woman’s affectations, and she has too many traits in common with a dowager philanthropist to make that old aristocrat congenial. Because of her financial contributions to a charity school, however, Marie is at least tolerated, and she puts her carpentry to good use in renovating the school’s quarters unassisted.

Claire, the sewing mistress of the new school, a penniless, timorous and fragile young woman of twenty, appeals instantly to Marie’s emotions. Within a matter of weeks they are inseparable. Marie frightens off a tentative suitor of Claire’s in a fashion which sows the seeds of town gossip. When Claire succumbs to pneumonia Marie nurses her through the illness and later takes the girl into her house as companion. As Marie herself has by now refused a second proposal, slander runs rife. The isolation in which the two live is delightful to Marie, but it palls upon Claire so much that when a previous swain returns from his regiment she welcomes him. Marie is seized with a jealousy she cannot conceal. The man taunts her with her reputation, but since she is innocent, even ignorant of its implications, her reaction is merely one of defiance.

When Claire contracts tuberculosis, Marie takes her to the Mediterranean coast and acts as housekeeper and nurse to her socially-inferior beloved. Far from being grateful, the girl puts her benefactrice through some bitter hours, although she does soften before dying. Returning alone to Vermont, Marie discovers that her eccentric benevolence has only fed the ugly legends about her until the girl’s death is credited to their intimacy, and she is completely ostracized. She responds with contempt, buying strong tobacco at the village shop, riding astride as no other Vermont woman has ever done, and laughing in the faces of those who cut her. This blatant defiance ultimately provokes retaliation from the town’s riff-raff, friends of Claire’s soldier-suitor, so that her property and person are no longer safe and she is forced into complete seclusion with only books for company.

Now, for the first time, she learns the nature of her own difference. She recognizes that from earliest childhood she has found men ridiculous and revolting; that women have provided the only interest in her life; moreover, that