Sex variant women in literature

Before 1914

Insofar as secondhand information is to be trusted, it appears that female variance figured but twice in German fiction before the late 1890s. Lewandowski’s Das Sexualproblem in der modernen Literatur und Kunst ... seit 1800 lists Johannes Flach’s Sappho: Griechische Novelle (1886) under the heading of homosexual literature without further comment. The Jahrbuch during 1907 cited a passage from a romantic novel of the 1820’s, Ernst Wagner’s Isidora, which describes the same sort of innocent play between a princess and her maid-in-waiting as Lamartine pictured in “Regina,” with the difference that the bond between Wagner’s two girls appears wholly physical.[1] As Lewandowski’s criterion for inclusion seems to have been overt sexual action, he may have omitted subtler studies of variance; and Hirschfeld’s frankly biased journal was not too much concerned with discreditable bisexual records. Therefore it is possible that nineteenth-century German novels comparable to Balzac’s Seraphitus-Seraphita or Cousine Bette were passed over as negligible. But when one recalls the emptiness of the record in English during the same period, and remembers that in the matter of feminine mores Germany resembled Victorian England rather than France, any exhaustive reading of German fiction promises rewards incommensurate with the labor involved.

Interest in female variance was, however, already alive when Hirschfeld’s efforts in 1896 began to encourage its literary expression, as evidenced by the sudden outburst of fiction as well as poetry during the following decade. In 1897, Gabriele Reuter, a writer of ability, published a novel of autobiographical pattern, Aus guter Familie,[2] which included among its heroine’s early experiences a variant, possibly lesbian, attachment—the Jahrbuch’s note does not specify. In 1900 Elisabeth Dauthendey produced Vom neuen Weib und seiner Sittlichkeit,[3] semi-narrative sketches like Colette’s in Ces Plaisirs. The “New Woman’s” ideal is a life of quiet intimacy with other women, free of the “brutal” relations with men which dull appreciation of more delicate emotional nuances. An interlude with a tribade, a ‘confident, wise, almost manly’ individual, at first promises fulfillment of all the writer’s hopes. But a few amorous nights force her to recognize that, like a man, this woman cannot distinguish between crude sex and love. In the same year von Seydlitz used a case history from the 1840s—possibly from the same source as Kaspar’s Klinische Novellen—as the basis for Pierre’s Ehe: Psychologische Probleme.[4] Its hero is unfortunate enough to love an odd, hard, masculine girl who finally succumbs to his persistence, but is unable to cooperate sexually, and presently the partners find themselves in love with the same woman. In the course of a jealous brawl Pierre believes he has killed his wife; he makes a successful escape into the merchant marine and dies in Saigon without learning that he is innocent of manslaughter. The wife, now a confirmed transvestist, lives out her life as a valet without further emotional complication.

In 1900 also, Alfred Meebold included a tragic variant novelette, “Dr. Erna Redens Thorheit und Erkenntnis,”[5] in the volume Allerhand Volk. The larger portion of the tale presents Dr. Erna’s unhappy heterosexual affair with a fellow medical student. To recover from her consequent depression she travels in Italy with an artist, Lucie, who has been her particularly warm and eager confidante. The latter is a homosexual, but she manages to conceal the nature of her feelings until the two meet another woman, an artist long acquainted with Lucie. In the course of a quarrel this woman reveals Lucie’s secret. Although Dr. Erna has now recovered from her heterosexual disappointment and exhibits a sympathetic understanding of Lucie’s emotion, she is unable to return it in kind, and in despondency Lucie kills herself. Dr. Erna then returns to Germany full of crusading zeal against those who persecute homosexuals. This bears slight but sufficient resemblance to Borys’s later Carlotta Noll in French to suggest that both may have been based on a single known episode, or that the one influenced the other. The German version, be it noted, is by far the more sympathetic.

In 1901 a Danish novel by O. W. Møller was translated under the German title Wer kann dafür?[6] This traces the efforts of a German officer’s daughter to overcome a lesbian attraction and marry a young astronomer in the Heidelberg Observatory. She becomes deeply attached to her suitor but cannot respond physically; and so they part, although because of her masculine temperament and interests they are much closer in spirit than most married couples. Involving little dramatic action, this psychological study seems to have been of as high quality as Reuter’s Aus guter Familie. In contrast, August Niemann’s Zwei Frauen[7] involves an infatuation between a married woman and the brilliant music student whom her husband, head of a conservatory, has accepted as a pupil despite her apprehensive protests. The danger she foresaw materializes, and from there on the story becomes what the reviewer calls ‘an imitation of Belot’s Mlle Giraud which is hardly a credit to German letters.’

Much more interesting, in view of its author’s subsequent reputation, was Jacob Wassermann’s Geschichte der jungen Renate Fuchs (1900), and it is a matter of regret that this volume, though it ran to several editions, has proved inaccessible. The Jahrbuch’s review mentions a lesbian affair between two minor characters, a university student of political economy and the daughter of ‘one of Europe’s most famous courtesans.’[8] A puritanic critic later describes the heroine herself as “wading through all manner of filth,”[9] but makes no reference to homosexual experience either on her part or anyone’s else.

The year 1903 saw the publication of three lesbian titles. In Maria Eichhorn’s Fräulein Don Juan[10] the heroine’s strong and domineering sensual nature is roused in adolescence by homosexual affairs, but she later knows many men and never returns to her lesbian practices. Maria Janitschek’s “Neue Erziehung und alte Moral”[11] in Die neue Eva is the story of an orphan girl raised among seven foster brothers as one of them and without much supervision, so that she is enlightened early about matters of sex. At puberty she is abruptly cautioned by her foster mother against looseness with men and given a fearful picture of the fate of the unmarried mother. The resulting emotional conflict is severe, but at sixteen, when she shares her room and bed with a charming feminine guest, ‘at last in Agathe’s arms Seffi found a lovely peace.’ Upon being harshly berated for this innocent-seeming play, she defies authority. ‘It is your own upbringing that has driven me into the arms of my friend—now leave me there!’

An inferior Sind es Frauen?[12] by Aimée Duc pictures a large group of openly lesbian women in a German university town. Most of them are past the teens and slightly reminiscent of Peladan’s group centered about the Russian Simzerla, especially in that they spend much time discussing all aspects of sexual psychology. Most of them are foreigners—there seems to be a tendency in second-rate homosexual fiction to saddle some other country than the author’s own with the origin of lesbian characters. The leader of this group is Minotschka Fernandoff, a Russian ‘just released from three years of marriage,’ after having discovered that in sexual relations she needs to play the man. There is also Annie who has “escaped” marriage after only six months, Bertha Cohn whose beloved “Fritz” has moved in the other direction, getting engaged and finding she prefers a male lover, and Dr. Tatjana, mature and wise in the new medical psychology. And last, living with Minotschka, is a Polish music student, Countess Marta Kinzey, on whose account the Russian girl has come to Germany. The plot proceeds through a separation between Marta and Minotschka, during which the latter resists the advances of an actress and the former enters into a marriage of diplomatic necessity with a man who ‘knows all about her’ and is her husband in name only. In the end after much painful misunderstanding the two are reunited, to find that each has been faithful to the other. This is one of the volumes about which the Jahrbuch’s reviewer was most enthusiastic from a psychological viewpoint.

In 1901 Weiberbeute[13] was published in Budapest over the ambiguous pseudonym, Luz Frauman, and later it was considered worthy of a 4,000-word summary in Magnus Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten. Here transvestism plays a significant role for the first time since Rachilde’s novels, to the first of which this bears considerable resemblance. As in Monsieur Vénus, double inversion of sexual roles somewhat blurs the homosexual aspect; however, the period during which both significant characters are living as women justifies its inclusion here. Nana, an athletic but seductive girl reminiscent of Maupin, marries from cool expedience the wealthiest and most enslaved of her admirers. Thereby she incurs the implacable hatred of his son, a delicate boy ‘with the face of a Japanese girl,’ who lays an idolized mother’s death to his father’s dalliance with Nana. The father would ship his son to Australia, but Nana offers an alternative. She is skilled in hypnotism; she will throw the boy into a trance, and by suggestion will eradicate all memory, not only of his hatred but of his sex, leaving him convinced that he is a girl. ‘Conviction is the very essence of a human being,’ she says, ‘and so shapes growth that after this the boy’s male development will be arrested and he will be virtually a woman.’

This fantastic plan is carried through, and for three years the changeling, dressed as a girl, is Nana’s passionate adorer. In the meantime Nana has borne her husband a son who will be his heir unless the older boy is restored to his proper status. This dilemma naturally troubles the father and when in addition his wife’s charming ‘companion’ is demanded in marriage, he decides the mummery has gone far enough. But he reckons without Nana. Exerting her hypnotic powers now upon him, she moves him to shoot himself, inherits his fortune, consigns her own son to a boarding school, and sets out upon a world tour with her ‘girl companion.’ In love with the latter from the outset, she now considers releasing him from the hypnotic spell so that they can marry, but she fears a return of his former antagonism, and, in view of her own seniority, she decides to assume the man’s role herself. Always with the aid of hypnotism she achieves this end, marries her stepson, and sets up a household. Presently the desire for a child seizes the couple. Nana is for adoption but the ‘wife’ objects. And now, as Hirschfeld says, ‘comes a climax of fantasy so grotesque that the imagination conceiving it must really have been warped.’ Through her convenient powers Nana induces illusory pregnancy in the “wife,” bears the child herself, and contrives to get it into the “mother’s” arms at the correct psychological and physical moment.

But now an unforeseen complication develops. The “wife” hails the son as a girl. The necessity for concealing the child’s sex from everyone throughout its childhood puts a grave strain on Nana, but her ingenuity is equal to the task, and the family enjoys an uncommonly happy life for a matter of twenty years. When illness overtakes Nana she refuses a physician, and only on her deathbed pours out the truth to her “wife.” Though the hypnotic spell is now broken, the latter’s mental “set” is so completely established that he takes the story for mere delirious babbling. The author, Hirschfeld assures us, solves the two survivors’ problem as ingeniously as he contrived it, though it is difficult to imagine how. Aside from the stepson’s years of subjective lesbianism before marriage, the novel’s most noteworthy point is its presentation of hypnotism as able to effect complete endocrine change, an exaggerated foreshadowing of modern psychosomatic theory, and quite opposed to the then-popular hereditary hypothesis.

The remaining handful of minor novels before 1910 are of the sort which invariably appear upon a theme already proved profitable. Urningsliebe, by “O. Liebetreu”[14] is a masochistic tale of a girl who gives herself, her strength, and her money to a succession of five or six loves, and ends in prison serving a three year sentence for an offense committed by the last of them, in order to save her friend’s good name. Erich Mühsam’s Psychologie der Erbtante[15] is a half-satiric tragedy of a masculine woman of middle age, rather like Bonifas, who commits suicide because of a mysterious ‘unlucky love’ (supposedly heterosexual), in order to leave all her property to the girl with whom she had no luck. ‘Theodor’ (probably Anna) Rüling’s “Rätselhaft,”[16] one of three novelettes in her Welcher unter Euch ohne Sünde ist, also ends with a suicide. It is the story of a girl whose family has discovered her lesbian relations with a beloved friend and has separated the pair. Dreiunddreissig Scheusale,[17] published first in Leningrad (then, of course, St. Petersburg), was the work of a Russian actress, Annibal Sinowjewa. In it, a lesbian woman has lived for some time with a younger girl in a relation so perfect that she never doubts its permanence, and from sheer pride in her beloved’s beauty she encourages the girl to model for a life class of thirty-three men. The girl, as thoroughly schooled in erotic virtuosity as was the Girl with the Golden Eyes, becomes the common mistress of the artist group and never returns to her feminine lover. (This was not the sole, or even the first, Russian notice of feminine variance. Tolstoi had skirted it earlier in Anna Karenina with the brief emotional flame lit in Kitty by Varenka, and Dostoievsky came a step closer in A Friend of the Family, with the mutual attraction between Nyelochka and her friend. Both of these incidents occurred in late adolescence.)

During this same decade two major artists produced a series of works all of which are still freely available in German, and one, at least, in English. The symbolists in France did not touch upon female variance, unless one thinks of Monsieur Vénus, Méphistophéla, or La Gynandre as distantly related to symbolism, but these two men included the theme in spreading canvases of definitely symbolic style.

The first is the work of Heinrich Mann, older brother of the more famous Thomas. His Die Göttinnen (1902-03) is a trilogy within whose epic sweep he attempts to include every experience open to a woman of his time. Its subtitle is “Die drei Romane der Herzogin von Assy: Diana; Minerva; Venus.” But it is not under the aegis of Diana, as one might imagine, that the countess meets lesbian experience. The first volume (the only one available in English) is concerned with her devotion to the cause of Freedom, not for women, but political freedom for all oppressed people. Under the spell of Minerva in the second book her interest is turned to the arts, including letters. Though these two works are far from empty of dramatic emotional episodes, it is Venus who leads the countess at last to seek every possible form of love. After experience with several widely different male lovers, the most satisfying of whom is a younger man who ‘thinks like her,’ she returns to her mansion in Naples and takes ‘the one lover not yet tried—the crowd.’

She fills her house with beautiful young people in lieu of canvases and statues.

When this comparatively tame promiscuity palls, the countess turns to sadism. Though never indulging actively herself, she provokes frenzied jealousy among her own and others’ lovers, and the resulting violence would equal, were it not merely suggested rather than amplified, any recorded by “the divine marquis.” After all this, by way of final experiment, the countess has staged for herself alone, and at enormous cost, a lesbian bout between two expert performers, girls already so spent with depravity that their flesh is ‘like a no longer fresh glove over a masterfully sculptured hand,’ At the end of their act they collapse, deeply unconscious, but the countess merely gazes down at them with weary disillusion.

The chief significance of this episode is its serving as climax to all that has gone before, evidently representing for the author the ultimate depths of sexual depravity.

The second major German author is Frank Wedekind, who, like Balzac, presents three sharply contrasting pictures of female variance. Comparable in innocence to Seraphitus-Seraphita is the devotion in Mine-ha-ha (1909) of a child dancer to her ballet mistress, a woman in the late twenties, oriental in coloring, boyish of build, and military in the ruthlessness of her discipline. For sheer magic in imparting the illusion of reality to fantastic circumstances this novelette has few equals, but attention must be confined here to its variant aspects. For a half-dozen years, between seven and fourteen, Hidalla lives only for her fortnightly ballet lessons, and the intervening days pass in a maze of gruelling practice and bemused reverie. The latter, however, is not sexual. When Hidalla reaches the age—about eleven—for nightly appearance with the ballet troupe, objective self-expression partially relieves the intensity of her introverted emotion. As soon as she leaves the conventual rigors of the school for life as an élite demi-mondaine her outlook is completely altered. Although she feels no love for her wealthy male protector, she watches—at the age of perhaps sixteen—from his loge in the great municipal opera house while her former idol dances starring roles, and feels only a reminiscent warmth, as much for her own remembered obsession as for its one-time object.

She skirts the edge of two other experiences which serve to define the stringent ban upon lesbian intimacies in the training school. In pre-adolescence she feels a transient tenderness for a companion, but the latter is terrified at a half-proferred kiss during a twilight stroll. Does Hidalla not know the penalty for “going with” another girl? The sour and hideous servants who do the dormitory housework are there because in their training days they “went with” girls, thereby ruining forever their chances in that mysterious but alluring world beyond the gates into which the school’s finished products are released—though neither of the children has any idea what their place in it is to be. Hidalla’s second attraction is to one of the younger children whom she sees enter the school at seven as she did, shy and bewildered, and (like Claudine) she feels for this reflection of her earlier self a maternal as well as passionate love. She is barely adolescent at the time, but the love-starved life of these orphans whose existence is bounded by the Spartan walls of the school makes some such overflow of the heart inevitable. The small hours of a night that she spends crouched at the foot of the little girl’s bed, struggling with the hunger to go closer, restrained only by the knowledge that to do so may mean the child’s ruin, make a scene of delicate intensity equalling any in literature.

Wedekind’s second variant woman is the tailored and monocled English countess slavishly bound to Lulu, central figure of his symbolic dramas, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Lulu represents amoral, or, one might say, purely biological Woman. She is irresistible to the male, and knowledge of her brings brief ecstasy and lasting devastation. But she is as much victim of the force within her as are the men she enslaves. She is driven to murder in self-defense; then, fleeing the law in more and more desperate circumstances, she herself is murdered by an underworld wretch modeled upon Jack the Ripper. The English woman alone of all her lovers goes unrewarded throughout years of abject devotion, for Lulu is too completely Woman to feel any response save to Man. The countess not only exhausts her fortune in the service of her beloved, but at one point voluntarily contracts cholera so that she can enter the hospital where Lulu is hiding from justice; thus permitting Lulu to escape by assuming her clothing and identity. (It could be that the plot of the later Urningsliebe had its germ in this devotion.) In the end, realizing that Lulu has always wilfully used her, the countess attempts suicide, but Lulu feels neither pity nor compunction. She tells Jack—the man who finally kills them both—that the countess is her sister and insane, but his sophisticated intuition suggests the truth. He strokes the Englishwoman’s head and mutters ‘Poor creature,’ quite the only sympathy she has ever received. It does not, however, prevent Jack’s knifing her when she attempts to defend Lulu against him. Just before this happens, in a solitary monologue, the countess says:

She resolves to leave Lulu, who, she realizes, has from the beginning felt an uncontrollable antipathy to her. She will study law and devote the rest of her life to fighting for the rights of women—the implication being, of women like herself rather than the Ewigweibliche. It is at this point that the apache’s knife ends her unhappy existence.

In 1911 Wedekind published the satiric and still more symbolic drama, Franziska: A Modern Mystery, in which the primary theme is a woman’s struggle for individual independence. The protagonist Franziska, a girl just under twenty when the play opens, has been irrevocably prejudiced against the traditional feminine lot by childhood circumstances. She has also refused marriage with two men, one a physician who assumed that her surrender to him meant abject adoration, the other an elderly nobleman from whom she accepted an insurance policy securing the future of any child her free life might produce. She is bent upon living with all the independence of a man. Opportunity offers when she meets Veit Kunz, a theatrical manager whose sudden bursting into her drawing room out of a thunderstorm marks him as Mephistopheles to her Faust. He sees in her boyish bravura the possibility of exploiting her in the world of entertainment. Until lately, he says, audiences wanted women with lovely breasts, shoulders and arms. But his hunch is that taste is changing, and his business is to keep one jump ahead of the mode. Interestingly enough, it is as a singer he means to feature her, indicating a taste for feminine tenors a good decade earlier in Europe than in the United States, where they were not fashionable until the Twenties.

While studying voice and posing as a man, ‘Franz’ has a tavern affair with a young prostitute which is cut off at its zenith when the girl is shot by a jealous lover. Her next adventure is as the husband of a middle-class heiress, who wants, not a romantic hero, but a respectable husband and pater familias. When children fail to appear, the woman blames her husband’s fondness for a young dancer, and threatens to kill the girl unless she lets “Franz” alone. From a scene between Franziska and Veit Kunz, however, it appears that he and she have been intimate for a year, and a child is on the way. Franziska is resentful. Marriage has proved irksome because of her wife’s desire for a family, and has limited her freedom with both sexes. A child will be the final handicap. Kunz tells her that her wife is a much worthier soul than she, and that motherhood will bring more maturity than multiple adventures or his own dramatic training. However, he says that if she persists on her chosen path, vanity, selfishness and ambition such as hers are the drives that produce successful artists. An enemy informs her wife that Franziska is a woman, and the shock of the revelation causes the wife to commit suicide, setting Franziska free.

The third act of the drama moves to the estate of a wealthy nobleman, amateur playwright and owner of a private theatre, who has applied to Kunz for the services of his intriguing “male” star. Most pertinent to the present study is an interlude in which Franziska, in eighteenth-century man’s costume, appears to the count in a species of symbolic vision as the wish-fulfillment of his most secret dreams. She tells him she is neither boy nor woman, but the ideal of all those incapable of real passion; for love of another cannot go beyond love of self in these “Wunschlosen.” This technical description of narcissism (along with the drastic effect upon Franziska of early hatred of her father) shows Wedekind’s familiarity with the then very new doctrines of psychoanalysis.

The remaining acts show Franziska first sufficiently feminized by early pregnancy to play the part of Delilah on the stage, and to become infatuated and run off with the actor cast as Samson, who treats her with rough and contemptuous masculine superiority. Veit Kunz is prostrated. At fifty he sees his lifelong conviction controverted that happy sexual and professional association on a footing of equality must guarantee a permanent union. His brilliant intellectual acumen is outplayed by female biology—Woman beats the devil!—and he is barely saved from suicide. Finally Franziska, persuaded to abandon her career for the sake of her son’s health, is shown living in rural poverty with him. She refuses support from either Kunz or “Samson,” each of whom is sure her child is his, and accepts the protection of an ascetic artist who paints her as the madonna. Here Wedekind hits the narcissist complex dead center. It is proof against both homosexual and heterosexual experience and only partially resolved by maternity, since she can tolerate only a man weaker than herself and one romantically deluded about her.

Because of the Eulenberg scandal in 1907 literary reference to homosexuality was checked for a time in Germany, and no doubt only Wedekind’s established reputation and his disparaging treatment of the theme made the theatrical production of Franziska possible in 1911. By 1914 Dr. Kurt Heller was asking in the Jahrbuch: “Wo bleibt der homoerotische Roman?”[21] He was referring to male homosexuality, and he deprecated the moralistic tone of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, considering it disappointing from the author of Buddenbrooks. His answer to his own rhetorical question was that no sympathetic work could clear the hurdle of state censorship, for even a wholly “spiritual” treatment must be defined by some contrast with the sensual. Only true literary freedom could provide incentive for creative writing of first quality.

Until the post-war change in government no such freedom prevailed. In 1917 Sophie Hoechstetter’s Selbstanzeige: Die letzte Flamme[22] had to be printed privately. When it was attacked by a reviewer in Der Tag, the author defended the criticized “urnische Beanlagt” as an essential stage in the self-comprehension which was the theme of the whole novel. She also offered to supply the volume gratis to any interested reader, an indication that it had been excluded from public sale. With 1918, however, the ban was relaxed, and during the 1920s Germany shared with the rest of the western world a period of sexual freedom which ended only with the growing influence of Hitler in the 1930s. Even so, post-war sentiment in the English-speaking countries made German material unwelcome there, and the homosexual novels and magazines which abounded in Germany for a decade gained little circulation abroad.

With Hitler’s ascendancy these titles were so soon obliterated that it is difficult now to find more than the mere record in German trade bibliographies of their original publication. This is especially true because in 1921 Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch (by then a Vierteljahrsschrift) ceased publication. All efforts of the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee for repeal of the anti-homosexual Paragraph 175 of the Prussian criminal code had failed, and the organization was disheartened by the failure. Moreover, the fields of history and biography had been well covered in factual articles during the twenty-two years of the journal’s existence. And as for its function of reporting current homosexual belles-lettres, that was abandoned even before its own death because such literature was regularly reviewed in ‘other journals,’ (e.g., Die Freundin, Die Freundschaft, Freundschaft und Freiheit—later Eros—Junggesellen: mit den Beiblättern “Frauenliebe,” and Transvestit.) These are now almost completely lost, so that even descriptive notes on the literature in question are not accessible today.

Post-War Gleanings

Of the few lesbian novels to reach the United States one of the best was Anna Elisabet Weirauch’s three-volume Scorpion, which appeared in Germany between 1919 and 1921. It was translated a dozen years later in an abridged edition as two separate titles, The Scorpion (1932) and The Outcast (1933). Though slightly inferior in literary quality to Marie Bonifas, it shows equal mastery in accounting for and tracing the full history of an exclusively variant woman. The scene of Metta Rudloff’s childhood is a dreary city household consisting of her ineffectual father and a spiteful puritanic spinster aunt. Her care is entrusted to a nursery governess hired for no sounder reason than that the child takes an instant fancy to her. The young woman exhibits a facile affection which quickly enslaves her little charge, but her emotions are wholly bound to a cashiered military officer, who controls her completely and who alternately neglects her and lives on her bounty. To supply him with funds, she more than once pawns the Rudloff’s seldom-used family silver, employing Metta to secure it from its cupboard and taking her along on visits to the pawnbroker. When the misdemeanor is detected, the child is seriously involved, and the uncomprehended scandal, plus the loss of her beloved Fräulein, leaves a lasting scar.

During puberty and adolescence Metta attends a public school, but her father’s snobbery discourages friendships with her mates, and she grows up a bored and lonely introvert. Nearing twenty, she meets, at the home of relatives, a handsome and enigmatic woman a decade her senior and falls violently in love with her. Soon she is spending most of her time in her new friend’s rooms in a pension, and she is spurred for the first time to real intellectual effort in order to keep up with Olga’s wide interests. (Among these is the life and work of Karoline von Günderode, for whom Olga has come to feel an almost mystic affinity which stirs Metta to jealous fury.) At the pension Metta also meets a Dr. Petermann, musical aesthete and cripple, who frequently plays his violin for the two young women.

Discovering that Olga is financially embarrassed, Metta contrives to take foreign language lessons from her, but the two spend most of the funds so earned on concerts, opera, and long country excursions. On one of the latter, Metta notices that they are followed by a man. Her friend becomes distraught at the discovery and betrays that she has suffered the same experience before. The mystified younger girl on arriving at home is forbidden by her father to see Olga again or to leave the house, and presently she is visited by a psychiatrist. Under his questioning, she suddenly recalls that she has pawned the silver, following her childhood pattern, in order to redeem a gold cigarette case Olga was forced to sacrifice to momentary need. This object, a gift from an earlier beloved friend of Olga’s, is decorated with a jeweled scorpion, the zodiacal symbol of passion and death under which Olga was born. The psychiatrist delivers a subtle lecture on the destructive effects of emotional friendships between women. The mysterious man, he explains, was a detective employed by Metta’s father, who for some time has had the two girls under surveillance, and to gain legal power over Olga, has bought up her not-inconsiderable debts. Metta is to be sent to an uncle’s in the country so that separation may cure her of her unhealthy infatuation. Eventually, she is assured, she will thank her family and the doctor for having saved her from ruin. She is forced to leave Berlin without either explaining her departure or saying goodbye to Olga.

At her uncle’s she sets herself one goal: to escape and return to Olga. Before long she has so ingratiated herself with the household that it is not too difficult to obtain money secretly from her uncle’s desk and to reach the railroad station. In Berlin, Olga meets her, but instead of the warm welcome Metta anticipated, she merely remonstrates against the madness of Metta’s flight and refuses to harbor her, knowing the girl will at once be tracked to her rooms. After a very bad quarter-hour, however, Metta succeeds in persuading Olga to accompany her in an impulsive flight. The two take the next train scheduled for departure and get off at a station elected by chance. In the modest hamlet so discovered they spend a few ecstatic days of veritable honeymoon.

Hitherto they have exchanged no caresses—indeed, Metta has often been deeply hurt by Olga’s show of brusque coldness. Now at last she learns the true significance of her own feelings and of the older girl’s previous restraint. Though Olga felt a reciprocal passion, she has had previous difficulties because of an affair with a woman, and she dreaded risking another such ordeal. She declares that never again can she endure “to be stripped naked in public.” Once enlightened, Metta determines that they shall never be separated. Within six months she will attain her majority and be mistress of a large maternal inheritance. She writes her father of her whereabouts and her intentions, asking for temporary funds, but assuring Olga that if they are refused she will raise money on her expectations.

Her answer is a telegram from the aunt telling her that her father has had a stroke occasioned by the shock of her “robbing” her uncle, and that he is dying. Metta suspects a trap, but returns to find the news true, and lives through several hideous days before her father’s death ends the nightmare. During the subsequent night, half-delirious from exhaustion and her aunt’s vicious reproaches, she slips away to Olga’s rooms for solace. Here she is found at dawn by the aunt, the wronged uncle, and detectives. She declares her intention of never leaving her friend, but Olga, in the face of public denunciation, fails to come to her support, merely insisting that she is without responsibility in the whole matter.

Confined at home and half-ill, Metta finds herself suddenly surrounded by medical books and pamphlets on homosexuality, all condemnatory or scandalmongering. Despite the bitter blow dealt her love and pride by her friend’s defection, she writes Olga repeatedly, but receives no answer. After a time, sickened by her reading and wounded by Olga’s silence to the point of apathy, she allows herself, under pressure from her aunt, to become engaged. The socially noteworthy match is featured in the news, and on the eve of her marriage she has word from Petermann of Olga’s suicide. Olga had, of course, none of her letters, but had received many scurrilous anonymous threats in which Metta recognizes the hand of her hated aunt, and Olga had, moreover, been prosecuted by the Rudloff estate which held her debts. Shocked into sudden hard maturity, Metta sells the family house, settles an allowance on her aunt, and leaves Berlin, her only mementos Olga’s “scorpion” cigaret case and the revolver with which she shot herself.

The first German volume ends here, and the second opens in an unspecified large city, which in all probability actually represented another aspect of Berlin. There Metta, completely on her own, attempts to adjust to independent life. She plunges resolutely into solitary study, but without the incentive of discussion with Olga she finds the effort empty. Consequently she determines to “learn by living,” and allows herself to be drawn into a bohemian group, several members of which room in her own pension. Among these artists, journalists, and entertainers she finds a sexual freedom which profoundly shocks her, but laying the shock to her hitherto sheltered life, she refuses to withdraw, and shrugs off the half-maternal admonitions of a “respectable” coterie in the house. She is presently involved with a night club singer, Gisela, to whom she is drawn by learning that the girl’s obvious physical wasting and reputed drug addiction are the results of hopeless love for a woman. Their affair is essentially a matter of mutual physical assuagement, each girl being still in love with someone else. It is developed slightly more in the German volume than in the English Scorpion of which it forms the second part, but is not seriously expurgated in the latter.

A much more vital attachment begins between Metta and a handsome sculptress, Sophie, but is broken off by the latter because she has lived for years with an invalid who is completely dependent on her. This woman was Sophie’s salvation in a desperate period of her youth, and would give up the struggle to live if she felt herself no longer needed by her partner. Left essentially friendless by Sophie’s withdrawal, Metta drifts into a restless quest for diversion among the group of professional entertainers and homosexuals of whom Gisela is one. In the course of making a round of night clubs Metta becomes wretchedly ill from experimenting with cocaine, and recognizing amused contempt in the eyes of attractive strangers of the social class in which she was raised, she goes home filled with self-loathing to employ Olga’s cherished revolver and rejoin her lost love. She is checked by the ministrations of one of the “respectable” older women in the house, who confesses to a deep (though entirely innocent) affection for her, tells her she is too young to be knocking about alone, and sends her to stay with a sister in Hamburg whose husband is an alderman and whose daughter is a sheltered adolescent.

In this new milieu Metta is at first terrified lest she be followed by Gisela, but her fears prove groundless, and she is soon acting the model young lady, though she has need to guard her allusions to places recently frequented and uncensored books she read with Olga. She soon discovers that the daughter of the house is, beneath a seraphic exterior, as sophisticated as any of her late associates. The girl is carrying on an affair with a man twice her age whose charm briefly touches even Metta. She also constantly presses Metta to confess to lesbian tastes and experience, declaring that she “can always recognize the type,” and doing her best to seduce Metta by skillful caresses. This Hamburg interlude ends with a weekend trip on which Metta is supposedly Gwen’s chaperone. The fascinating man joins the expedition secretly, and proves a connoisseur of liquors and an adept at clandestine contrivance. In the girls’ room, Gwen, spurred by alcohol and the spring night, makes an unusually insistent play for Metta, but just as the latter is about to yield, the connecting door opens to admit the man, and she recognizes the whole trip as “a put up job” to seduce her into a party à trois. Utterly revolted, she makes a clean break with this life also, and searches further for some emotional stability and peace.

The third German volume (of which The Outcast, in English, is a literal and complete translation) shows Metta in a mountain town where she has made no personal contacts and has told no one anything of herself or her past. Falling in love with the beauty of the region, she buys land and decides to build; consequently, she must go to Berlin for legal and architectural advice. There, renewing connections with the crippled Petermann, she meets in his pension a woman who reminds her strongly of Olga and who produces almost as instantaneous an emotional impact. Metta soon learns that this is the friend who originally gave Olga the scorpion cigaret case, and that it was Corona who terminated the association because she believes it is always better to end love while it is still beautiful than to let it die. Corona has not even known of Olga’s death until she sees the scorpion in Metta’s hands.

Instead of returning to the mountains to watch her hitherto thrilling new house take form, Metta lingers in Berlin in Corona’s toils. She finds this woman less intellectual and harder than Olga, and dislikes intensely the exhibitionistic group of lesbians, some tailored, some merely histrionic, with whom her new flame associates. When she finally discovers that Corona is still half-involved in an old affair with a married woman, and is also encouraging the advances of a Russian girl in the pension, Metta flees to her mountains and lives quite alone in her new house, save for visits from Petermann and another man of tragic history met at Sophie’s before the end of that association. A passionately-anticipated visit from Corona, which Metta hopes may result in the latter’s taking up residence with her away from urban distractions, proves a bitter disappointment. Corona finally confesses that she is incurably restless and empty, a huntress who is free of an actual pain of physical need only while she is in process of snaring a new victim. She asks the privilege of using Metta’s mountaintop as an occasional sanctuary. Thereafter Metta settles in, not happy but at least relatively serene, to live alone and provide temporary peace for such of her friends as care to seek her out.

Comparison of this novel with La Bonifas is interesting because, despite their similarity in basic theme and the influence of initial traumatic incident, they are so widely different. Even the first incidents illustrate the difference: in La Bonifas, the physical violence of suicide enacted before the child’s very eyes; in The Scorpion, a psycho-social teapot-tempest involving the child only through her cross-questioning by a children’s psychiatrist, which she meets with passive resistance. In the one novel a female creature is endowed with all the extroverted tastes, interests, and abilities usually considered male. In the other the female creature is wholly feminine save for her sexual inclinations. Accordingly, Weirauch stresses the influence of environment. None of her lesbians are really masculine in appearance, and only one male homosexual looks born to the role. On the other hand, biographical vignettes are adroitly introduced to account for almost every variant in the story, and these are even more effective because they are not notably Freudian in pattern. Indeed, this novel’s quality lies in its verisimilitude, an effect naturally easier for a woman writer in this field than for a man. The inevitable conclusion drawn from these two novels together is that sexual variance is not so much an inborn factor in a life pattern as it is a concomitant result of other aspects of personality and experience.

A second German lesbian item, Die Schwester, is a drama of 1924 which in style shows the influence of Wedekind. The author, Hans Kaltneker, takes care to present in a foreword his convictions about homosexuality: it represents the height of egotism, the antithesis of the Christian spirit, for to love one’s own sex is to withdraw from the common life of humanity and imprison oneself in a futile sterility. He doubtless felt it necessary to voice this reassurance because in the first act of the play his attitude to the heroine appears wholly sympathetic. The homosexual Ruth loves her young stepsister, Lo, but controls her feelings until chance throws them together for a night. She is subsequently cast out by her stepfather, and his daughter is hastily married to the first available man. Ruth then lives with a lesbian artist, whose ‘eyes and mouth were shadowed by black melancholy,’ and who tells her that lasting love is impossible for their sort—they can gain satisfaction only through debauchery. The two visit a homosexual tavern—presented symbolically after the fashion of Wedekind—and Ruth chooses among the commercial dancing partners a girl who resembles her lost stepsister. As she is very drunk, she imagines this is her sister’s spirit, and she “receives a message” that Lo really loves her, but advises her to abandon her vicious way of life and devote herself to helping other lost women. She later learns that Lo had died but a few moments before she received this mystic communication, and takes it for a supernatural revelation. Accordingly she becomes a nurse in a women’s hospital for veneral disease, but her unconcealable preference for the gentler, slim, young patients breeds antagonism, and when she herself becomes infected she is discharged. Too ill to work, she is violated by men and robbed even of her clothing. She ends in a woman’s prison where her dying act is to give her one remaining garment to an ungrateful drunken prostitute. Thus, she is redeemed through having sacrificed herself for others.

In 1927 Frank Theiss, in Interlude, employed a lesbian episode to explain the failure of his hero’s first marriage. The wife had, at eighteen, been “entrapped” by an older woman highly esteemed in the community. “The enticements and snares must have been cunningly laid, for it was always unthinkable to Kurt ... that Sabina could have been in love with her.”[23] When, after six months or so, the affair came to light, “the furious father would certainly have called on the police authorities if any power of police or judiciaries could have helped,” a subtle thrust at the injustice of legal penalty for homosexual men as compared to none for women.

The parents then married their daughter off to the first available man, but the affair had left a scar. This was not the frigidity one might expect. On the contrary, it was “an alert and conscious, a more than mature ... an erotic atmosphere”[24] which made the girl unusually “beguiling” to men. Still, she was not happy in her marriage, and the explanation given is that she had been physically awakened without knowing love. Thus, she was drawn to her husband also without love, and their marriage was the “exchange of a conventional form of excitement.” Once she had obtained a divorce and married someone whose appeal for her was complete, not merely physical, she “became another person. This voluptuous glitter was all gone, she was just sweet and charming.”[25] While the handling of the episode is somewhat hasty and superficial, the argument it presents against pre-marital lesbian experience is more subtle and rather more convincing than many one meets in anti-variant fiction.

A sterner condemnation of lesbianism came from Herbert Eulenberg in “Der Maler Rayski,” a novelette in the volume Casanova’s Letzte Abenteuer (1929), in which he presents a domineering lesbian woman of almost sadistic ruthlessness. This titled landowner has long kept a younger cousin-companion in lesbian bondage. She loathes men, but must have an heir to inherit her properties, and hits upon the device of inducing her beloved to bear a child whom she can then adopt. Since the sire must be of good stock, she selects a contemporary artist whose qualifications please her, summons him to paint portraits of her and her companion, and contrives to get the latter married to him by stressing the excellence of the girl’s financial prospects. The couple fall genuinely in love, and, under the influence of normal love, the girl blooms from strained pallor into perfect health and loveliness. As soon as a child is expected, however, the older woman secures a series of such advantageous commissions for the artist that he must be absent until after his child’s birth. She then denies him access to the infant—what right has any man to the child in whose begetting he has played but a momentary part, while the woman has carried it for nine months and must nurse it for as many more? To clinch the matter she tells him of the long years of intimacy between herself and his wife. Now he feels that his bride’s innocence was all pretence, and that anyone who could have deceived him about so black a past can never be trusted. He makes off, proudly refusing any monetary settlement then or later, and deteriorates into a worthless drifter because of this devastating blow to his self-respect. The two women remain together, apparently happy, since motherhood provides the girl with some normal interest.

Since the film Mädchen in Uniform had fairly wide circulation in this country, Christa Winsloe’s corresponding novel The Child Manuela will need but a brief résumé. The motion picture was released in 1932 and reached this country in the latter part of the same year, but the novel did not appear even in Germany until 1933, and so must have been one of the last variant publications launched before Nazi ascendancy wiped out homosexual literature. Those fortunate enough to have seen this remarkably sympathetic picture or any of several good amateur productions of the play on the legitimate stage here are unlikely to have forgotten it. The motherless Manuela, at fourteen, enters a boarding school for the daughters of officers where the headmistress, herself descended from a military line, imposes barracks discipline upon her young charges. One mistress alone contrives to preserve some human warmth despite the severity she is obliged to maintain, and the girls worship her.

Manuela, accustomed to maternal tenderness throughout childhood, is made almost ill by the harsh regime until her emotions fix themselves upon the general favorite, Fräulein von Bernberg. It is soon evident that her feelings are more profound and violent than the average. The mistress, moved by the pathetic and neglected girl, befriends her and becomes warmly attached to her, even confessing that she prefers her to the other students, but she warns Manuela that such emotions are not countenanced among soldiers’ daughters and admonishes her to learn self-control. The knowledge that she is loved raises Manuela to a dizzy ecstasy which she manages to conceal for a time. But the excitement of playing male lead in an amateur theatrical, plus a party afterward with heavily “spiked” punch and abandoned dancing, prove too much for her high-strung temperament, and, slightly hysterical as well as literally drunk, she proclaims her secret to the entire school. The relation between pupil and teacher, though passionate, has been wholly innocent, and Manuela is unaware of its further potentialities. The adamant headmistress puts the worst construction on her hysterical outburst, sentences her to solitary confinement for the remainder of the term—diplomacy prevents her expulsion—and forbids her to see Fräulein von Bernberg again. Now genuinely ill from shock and emotional frustration, the girl contrives to reach her idol’s room, but the older woman, aware of the danger to them both and afraid of her own emotions, maintains a frigid composure. Beside herself, Manuela climbs to the top floor of the tall school building and leaps to her death at the foot of an open stairwell.

This school interlude comprises only the last third of the novel, the previous sections portraying Manuela’s development from her earliest memories to the time of her entering the institution. The family has moved from one army post to another, the necessity for maintaining her father’s military prestige taking precedence over all other family needs. The girl was first passionately devoted to her mother. During pre-adolescence she falls in love with a public schoolmate, Eva, who is also the choice of her older brother. Manuela spins fantasies of being a male acrobat or dramatically winning the notice of her adored in other ways, but it is only as Berti’s sister that she is of interest to Eva. After her mother’s death, at thirteen, she has a brief and stimulating friendship with a boy violinist, but it is his mother who appeals to her emotionally and to whom she sends flowers. When the woman embraces her, she experiences the first stirrings of unrecognized passion. Aware of her obvious blossoming, her father’s prim housekeeper assumes it is young Fritz who has roused her emotions, and the woman persuades her father and aunt that she must be separated from him. Hence the boarding school.

Here one has an uncommonly high-strung child with a strong mother-fixation, without friends of her own age up to the time of her mother’s death. She often mentally assumes a boy’s role because only men and boys seem to count in the life about her. At puberty she is deprived of both mother and mother-substitute and shut into a virtual military prison, the opposite of her hitherto relatively free existence. Both the inevitable emotional explosion at school and the careful preparation for it owe a debt to Freudian theory.

In a second novel, translated in 1936 as Girl Alone, Winsloe includes variance only in passing. The heroine is Eva-Maria, whose name skillfully forecasts the mixture of sensuality and romantic mysticism in her later experience. As a struggling art student, she first loves a handsome boy whom she does not succeed in winning. She is next seduced by one of her instructors, an established sculptor and Don Juan for whom she poses nude, and as an aftermath of this bitter affair she gives herself recklessly to a stranger on a night when otherwise she might have leaped into the river. The variant element is introduced in the person of Fax, a tailored and gauche fellow student with whom she shares an apartment. This girl loves Eva passionately, but receiving no response, she is satisfied to look after her with almost maternal solicitude. The two enjoy sundry revels with a bohemian group including one inseparable lesbian couple and a number of unattached homosexual women. When Fax, though still in love with Eva, engages in a flirtation with one of these, an alluring actress, jealousy spurs Eva toward giving Fax what she craves. Eva waits in her roommate’s bed for her return from a studio party, but Fax does not come home until daybreak—she has succumbed to the actress’s blandishments—and Eva never confesses what she had intended. Eva herself remains unmoved by genuine passion throughout the crisis.

This is apparently the final variant episode in German fiction before the Nazi purge began, and three years later authors who had dealt with the subject, however mildly, were eager only for general oblivion of that fact. Thus far, there has been no evidence of a subsequent variant renascence.

One feature of these foreign twentieth-century novels which must strike even a casual observer is the high incidence of suicide among variant women. Physical or mental illness is also often attributed to lesbian practices. Both reflect the extent to which variant fiction was based on clinical reading. Both, too, are facile means of producing dramatic effect, and tend to placate the strait-laced by suggesting that, though man may tolerate aberration, nature will not. Such devices are avoided by writers of first rank—Colette, Rolland, Proust, Lacretelle and Mann—while in Wedekind the melodramatic is seasoned by satire. A second conspicuous motif is the struggle for personal independence which leads women to eschew marriage and motherhood or to achieve self-realization at the expense of family responsibilities. This reflects the progress of the women’s movement and the influence of Ibsen, Ellen Key and others. Discernible also is a slight decrease in the proportion of bisexual experience, due undoubtedly to the prevalence of hereditary theory. And last, there appears in more than a few novels a background of shifting homosexual groups, far above the underworld level, such as Peladan alone pictured earlier and then only as small private closed circles. It will be interesting to see how many of these continental features appear in English and American fiction.