Sex variant women in literature

Certainly best-known of the year’s titles is Dorothy Baker’s Trio, on which a play was based, since its stage history virtually duplicated that of The Captive seventeen years earlier. Its opening in Philadelphia was well attended and reviewed, and the play ran on Broadway for a little more than a month before being closed through pressure from a combination of religious interests. One of the New Yorker staff interviewed various signers of the petition for its withdrawal, and found that several had neither seen the play nor read the novel from which it was made before lending their names to the protest.

The story presents the struggle between a Frenchwoman on an American university faculty and a young art photographer for possession of a girl who is departmental assistant to the former. Pauline Maury has just published a brilliant study of the fin de siècle French decadents, notably Verlaine and Rimbaud. Like them, she is an advocate of exploring the limits of sensibility under all possible stimuli from alcohol to sexual passion, with veiled hints at drugs and flagellation, but naturally this aspect of her life is well concealed. The girl Janet, at first a passionate intellectual and emotional devotee, has been reduced by intimacy with Pauline to the limit of stability when a whirlwind courtship by Ray Mackenzie and a wholesome heterosexual liaison with him save her from further exploitation. Though Ray reacts with blind rage and contempt to her confession of her past relations with Pauline, there is at least a chance that he will come around enough to marry her when he has cooled. The defeated and frustrated Frenchwoman shoots herself.

This is the essence of the drama, artistically in need of no accessories, but probably to avoid elaboration of its morbid emotional elements Mrs. Baker added an offense more permissible of stress. The substance of Pauline’s monograph was stolen from the dissertation of a married friend to whose premature death her own relations with the woman contributed, and the widowed husband retaliates by exposing her plagiarism. This disgrace provides adequate motivation for the suicide which makes so effective a dramatic climax, but it lessens the power of the whole. Pauline as a self-defeating decadent is an unsavory but convincing personality. With the added onus of literary theft she too nearly degenerates into mere villain. Of this century’s four widely circulated dramas, then—The Captive, Mädchen in Uniform, The Children’s Hour, and Trio—only the German film succeeded in being good theatre without blurring in some way the variant theme.

Two passing references in 1944 were Erskine Caldwell’s single flippant paragraph in Tragic Ground: a bartender’s account of discovering his wife at play in the back room of her beauty salon with two of her young patrons,[43] and Jean Stafford’s vignette in Boston Adventure of a Back Bay dowager who fawns upon each season’s debutantes without once suspecting her own motivation. The heroine, however, bearing scars still unhealed from her childhood under the spell of a neurotic mother now in a sanatorium, is literally sickened by the woman’s fulsome caresses.[44]

In 1945 Nora Lofts inserted in her historical novel Jassy a disparaging middle section, “Complaint from Lesbia,” involving a triangle of two middle-aged school mistresses and the romanticized title figure, then a kitchen maid of thirteen. From girlhood the now-widowed Mrs. Twysdale has worshipped her intellectual cousin, Katherine, and in youth chose as husband the suitor who most resembled her. The two women have jogged along undramatically enough for twenty years in their joint school enterprise when the advent of the remarkable Jassy moves Katherine to unadmitted passion and Mrs. Twysdale to vengeful jealousy. It is the precocious Jassy herself, now a favored student through Katherine’s efforts, who at fifteen accepts unjust dismissal without protest because she recognizes that Katherine will ultimately be better off keeping her lifelong business partner. Here Mrs. Twysdale, pettily feminine and feline, is alone identified with “Lesbia,” (semantically unrelated to Catullus), while the other two exhibit traits implied by Miss Lofts to be masculine.

In the same year Mary Renault in The Middle Mist provided a tonic relief with a variant portrait as piquant as any since Mlle de Maupin. Leo (christened Leonora) can, at twenty-five, be mistaken for a teen-age boy even by her own sister after a long separation. She makes a good living by writing “westerns,” lives on a houseboat within commuting distance of London, and avoids situations requiring feminine costume. For seven years she has maintained a comfortable domestic ménage with a nurse who once saved her life. Neither girl’s single brief experiment with a man was happy, and both find their common life wholly satisfying. Still they do not avoid the company of men, and a good part of the story is concerned with the growth of Leo’s friendship with a fellow author into a love which leads finally to marriage. Her difficult choice between her two very real loves, determined largely by her desire for children, is movingly presented.

Her initial attempt at masculine independence was occasioned by intolerable friction between her parents, and her own temperament made it a success. When her younger sister, kept feminine and helpless by a doting mother, follows Leo’s pattern of flight, she simply presents herself on Leo’s doorstep and stays for a long season without realistic thought of who is paying for her keep. Her own adolescent means of escape from family tension has been a steady diet of cheap fiction, and she can see her future only in its sugary terms. When real heartbreak ends a stupid little romance built on nothing more than wishful dreaming, she creeps back to the parental nest, where one imagines her withering into bathetic spinsterhood, haunting rental libraries in search of more stories with happy endings. The parallel development of the two sisters’ lives constitutes a strong argument in favor of lesbian intimacy as against inhibited Victorian romancing. One of the most vivid features of The Middle Mist is its humor, a quality hitherto conspicuously lacking in variant fiction. (Gautier, Gunter, Bennett and Mackenzie are the exceptions.) Leo’s taking a conceited young doctor down a notch by flirting successfully with the nurse he brings to a party and then neglects for other women would be hilarious in any setting. In a variant novel it gleams as an unmatched gem.

Second Crescendo

The end of the war produced no such immediate effect on variant fiction as did the beginning, but gradually quantity increased with the accelerating speed of a geometric progression. Consequently, many of the thirty-odd novels which appeared from 1946 through 1954—all still relatively accessible—must receive short shrift. Brief and disparaging variant or lesbian passages were included in Remarque’s Arch of Triumph (1945 in English), Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), Felix Forrest’s Carola (1948), Philip Wylie’s Opus 21 (1949) and Disappearance (1951), Theodora Keogh’s Meg (1950), Robert Wilder’s Wait for Tomorrow (1952), Joan Henry’s Women in Prison (1952) and Maurice Druon’s Rise of Simon Lachaume (1951; in English, 1952). Characters varied from prostitutes to socialites; action, from sentimental philandering to a jealous knifing.

Longer derogatory treatments were presented by an equal number of authors. In 1946 Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit (a translation of Huis Clos, 1945) had a brief but unchallenged run in New York. Its three characters, impounded in a small room in hell, are: a cowardly political traitor who has also heaped every humiliation on a devoted wife; a woman who has broken several men for her own amusement and killed her unwanted child; and a manhating lesbian who has stolen her cousin’s wife and then talked her victim into a joint suicide pact. Since the lesbian’s sins seem less heinous than those of the other two, her emotional anomaly must be viewed as evening the balance.

Christopher LaFarge’s The Sudden Guest (1946) is concerned with a colossal egotist who closes her doors against victims of a New England hurricane. Desperation emboldens them to enter despite her, but she is untouched by their several stark tragedies. Only one handsome and cultured woman is welcome, for reasons half snobbish, half emotional. This Mrs. Cleever has with her an infant son, but is indifferent to his welfare because of her grief at the drowning of his nursemaid, with whom she was obviously infatuated. The last waifs to arrive are a low-class boy and a girl of fifteen whom he has saved from drowning and carries naked in his arms. Galvanized from her stupor, Mrs. Cleever snatches the beautiful figure from him and, unassisted, carries the girl off to her room. Later the spinster-hostess finds the two sleeping nude in each other’s arms, and this alone has the power to move her—but only to jealousy and self-pity for her own loneliness.

Three comparatively mediocre works of 1947 were equally severe. George Willis’s Little Boy Blues recounts the machinations of a lesbian to achieve marriage and motherhood as a “front” to protect her reputation and as a means of securing her future. She then deserts her victim and uses the child as a financial hold upon him while pursuing her own inclinations, until he is goaded into killing her. Ethel Wilson in Hetty Dorval pictures the near-capture of a Canadian girl of eighteen by a courtesan on vacation from her profession and posing as a respectable woman in Vancouver. In Not Now but NOW, Mary F. K. Fisher’s chief figure is a woman as ageless as Orlando and a ruthless egomaniac in all eras and settings. It is in a small Ohio town during the Twenties that she involves a college girl in a lesbian scandal.

The title figure in James Ronald’s The Angry Woman (1948) externally resembles Sinclair Lewis’s Dr. Herringdean, and, like her, is a successful business executive. Her hold upon Fern Oliphant dates from a bedridden year in the latter’s teens and continues till her suicide a decade later. Lesley uses every means to increase Fern’s dependence upon her, and tries first to prevent and then to break up a marriage arranged by the girl’s mother. Unlike Lewis’s unalloyed monster, however, this woman insists she has never been a lesbian. Her own marriage failed on its first night (cf. the French Méphistophéla), and her passion for the girl has also gone unfulfilled. She sees her own fondness as the only truly maternal devotion Fern has ever known. To everyone else it wears the aspect of subjective cannibalism.

A more complex case appears in Margaret Landon’s Never Dies the Dream (1949). But for its expressed horror of variant passion this novel would belong among the favorable studies, for its mainspring is a love as constructive and as delicately presented as that in the Book of Ruth. Like its author’s now famous Anna and the King of Siam, it is laid in Siam, but in this work the heroine is an unmarried American missionary. India gives sanctuary in her mission school to a countrywoman a decade her junior, widow of a Siamese of high rank, because the girl is in danger of violence from her husband’s relatives and of sexual molestation by a European. When India isolates herself with the girl to nurse her through an attack of typhoid, she is accused by a rival mission teacher of being “enamored” of her patient. Agonized soul-searching forces her to admit she feels Angela to be “bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh,” but she can find nothing blameworthy in her love. The maternal element is further stressed when Angela, upon returning to America, leaves her most treasured possession as a parting gift to “my mother-in-love.” It should be admitted that passion of any sort is regarded darkly in the volume—quite justifiably in view of its uglier recorded manifestations—but one can only regret an astigmatism which sees so vividly the beauty of a selfless passion (for its incandescent intensity is undeniably passionate) and is still blind to its essential nature.

Hugh Wheeler’s The Crippled Muse (1952) does not condemn lesbianism per se so much as one of the personalities involved. This is another sparkling comedy of Capri. The three figures significant here are all Americans. Liz Lewis is a wealthy and domineering shrew of apparently innate masculinity, whose record as a finishing school teacher was as technically immaculate as Clare Hartill’s in Regiment of Women, until her dismissal at perhaps thirty. This was occasioned by the conspicuous infatuation of a student in her late teens after the girl was violently orphaned. At the time of this story these two have lived together for a decade and the younger, Loretta, is more than tired of the arrangement; yet she stays because she feels responsible for their plight. A sympathetic young professor induces her to break away and marry him. He is not shocked by her history but is hotly antagonistic to the woman who has so long exploited her sense of guilt to hold her captive. (Incidentally, Liz had used Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market in her original capture of Loretta by stressing their parallelism—unconvincing—to Lizzie and Laura).

Less tolerance of lesbianism marks Sara Harris’s The Wayward Ones (1952), a social worker’s study of homosexuality in a reform school. Termed “the racket” by the adolescent inmates, it at first terrifies and repels a sixteen-year-old girl committed to the institution for unmarried motherhood. She sees, however, that the pairing of “moms” and “pops” brings solace and a sense of belonging to many of the girls involved, and that the authorities make no effort to check the practice, to which they remain questionably blind. When at last she “marries” one of the “pops” to gain protection from an unbalanced housemate who has attempted to kill her, her assumption of the new status marks the beginning of rapid deterioration. She becomes a ruthless liar and schemer, and makes plans to become a “call girl” for both men and women when she is released from the school.

Perhaps the most virulent attack was launched by Simon Eisner in Naked Storm, another paper-backed original of the same year. A predatory woman novelist, on the eve of departing for California, first seduces a young art student whom she leaves ill with self-loathing. On the transcontinental train she repeats the experiment with an older woman, who is highly intelligent but emotionally starved. This woman is also courted by a shy and unhappy man, but his rival’s expert sophistication rapidly reduces his chances. At this point an ex-war correspondent decides to play deus ex machina. Moved by savage hatred of all lesbians and this arrogant specimen in particular, he takes advantage of a sixty-below-zero blizzard which stalls the train for some thirty hours in the Donner Pass, goads the self-sufficient lesbian into going out into the night for snow to ice her liquor, and furthermore, manages so to confuse her that she loses her bearings in the arctic blackness and freezes to death. The author plainly enjoys this dénouement as much as Belot enjoyed killing off Mme. Blangy.

The latest condemnation is incorporated in Strange Sisters (1954), a pot-boiling murder story by a writer who calls himself “Fletcher Flora.” Opening with the knifing of a man by a girl who has led him to embrace her but then finds her sexual revulsion unconquerable, it flashes back to the causes of her inhibition. The earliest was childhood idolatry of the more or less innocently seductive aunt who raised her (cf. the mother-daughter relation in Star Against Star). The second was deliberate seduction by a women’s college instructor when the girl was a lonely and maladjusted freshman; the third a repetition with a department store personnel manager as agent. Each of these older women, in increasing degrees, was interested only in her own emotional needs and not at all in her victim’s welfare. The girl ends with complete mental breakdown and suicide.

All these condemnatory treatments were balanced by as many mildly or strongly sympathetic studies. The briefest of these are two short stories, one “Orestes” in Rhys Davies’s A Trip to London (1946), in which a lesbian waitress frees a middle-aged bachelor from his paralyzing mother fixation precisely because her attitude toward him is so free of feminine seduction. The other is Isabel Bolton’s “Ruth and Irma” (1947), a reminiscent and gently ironic sketch of an infatuated pair of girls roaming the Riviera during the Twenties, which lays their histrionics directly to their saturation with that decade’s fiction. A more important role is assigned to lesbianism in Lucie Marchal’s prize-winning French novel of 1948 translated in 1949 as The Mesh, a Freudian study of a domineering woman’s influence on the lives of her son and daughter. The son’s marriage to a timid widow proves a fruitless gesture of defiance. The daughter, always jealous of the mother’s preference for her brother, is gradually liberated from her own fixation by an increasing interest in the pitiful and helpless young wife. In the end her protective impulses become passionate and she takes the girl away to live with her. It is plain, however, that she, like her mother, will soon tyrannize over her captive as stringently as she herself has been dominated.

Another paper-backed original was Women’s Barracks (1950) by Toreska Torres (according to Publishers Weekly the pseudonym of an established author). This purports to be a description of life in the London headquarters for women recruits of the Free French forces; however, it is not a translation. An important thread in the meandering plot is the love of a shy girl of seventeen for a much older woman, wholesome and maternal though vulgar, who has consoled herself while married to a “pansy” by intimacies with both men and women. One or two completely lesbian couples in the house refuse to recognize Claude as one of themselves—“She’s a pervert, a curiosity seeker.” Nevertheless her influence on Ursula is beneficent. Soon the girl turns to men, the lesbian interlude having cracked the shell of her naïve reserve and matured her for other experience.

Easily the eeriest of all references to variance is Shirley Jackson’s in her remarkable study of late adolescence, Hangsaman (1951). Here a girl, as precariously balanced as Ann in Pity for Women, is inhibited by a father fixation, and driven farther from normal experience by a cryptically-described incident, perhaps actual assault, but more likely only heavy petting, by an older man at a cocktail party in her own home. In a “progressive” college, quite unsupervised, she becomes more and more solitary and withdrawn until her sudden friendship with an ideally sympathetic girl companion. This alter ego, whose allure she finally recognizes as physical and fights off, proves actually to be only the other half of her own split personality. In other words, the drama in Hangsaman is that of an abnormally sensitive girl’s narrow escape from schizophrenia.

In the same year Whit and Hallie Burnett included in Sextet: Six Story Discoveries John Eichrodt’s “Nadia Devereux,” which its author describes as a feminine “parody” of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. It need not, then, be further discussed than to say that it treats understandingly the secret infatuation of an internationally-renowned woman lecturer on international law for an exquisite girl on the clerical staff of the United Nations. Like its model, it follows the older woman’s gradual disintegration and death from the violence of her inhibited yet undisciplined passion.

Appearing also in 1951 was a sensational trifle reminiscent of the worst of the 1930s, Strange Fires by Jack Woodford. This is a sexual riot with lesbian action prominent, in which, as in Love Like a Shadow, one girl is essentially “monogamous” in spirit. Rhoda and her finishing-school roommate, both initiated by their physical education teacher, “marry” one another and are briefly happy. But the discovery that her partner and Miss Pat are continuing their relation wounds Rhoda deeply, and their taking her to an “orgy” in a Park Avenue socialite’s apartment completes her disillusion. She finally marries a man (implying that she is still “normal”), and the two other young women continue in a mutually free alliance.

A sympathetic treatment which bows to orthodox standards by ending tragically is presented in Spring Fire (1952), paper-backed original by Vin Packer, admitted pseudonym of an established male author. Here a lonely boyish co-ed in a midwestern university is willingly seduced by her sorority-house roommate and finds the lesbian relation a happy one as long as it remains secret. It is the seducer, neurotic daughter of a promiscuous widow, who feels guilt and carries on simultaneously an excessive affair with a man to prove herself normal. The unsophisticated Mitch is urged to do likewise, but she cannot follow through her two squeamish efforts, and she reacts with loathing to drunken violation by a fraternity man. When suspicion of lesbianism falls on the two girls the neurotic accuses her victim of having been the seducer. Mitch is expelled from the sorority, and only the understanding dean of girls and the college physician avert disaster. In his naturalistic picture of campus sex life in general the author treats the lesbian aspect with comparative sympathy and attributes its destructive effects to the neurotic girl’s sense of guilt. This is induced by her mother’s influence and ripens into a full-blown psychosis. She ends in a mental institution.

Two much happier episodes were featured in novels of 1952. In Fay Adams’s paper-backed original, Appointment in Paris, an American orphan in her teens is matured sufficiently to weaken a spinster aunt’s dominance through her intimacy with a wholesome, if irresponsible, French courtesan living in a neighboring apartment. She then enjoys a liaison with a Frenchman and later happily marries an American. Both men know her history. May Sarton’s infinitely superior novel, A Shower of Summer Days, includes the brief infatuation of an American girl, half-through college, for her Anglo-Irish aunt. Sent abroad by her mother to terminate an undesirable romance at home, she at first truculently resists her aunt’s overtures and her own impulses toward friendliness. The aunt, once a great beauty, childless, and still bound to her husband by mutual passion which has survived two decades of marriage, is an irresistible personality and comes to exert great influence on the girl. As with Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse, it is partly the relation between wife and husband which fascinates the girl; however, her emotions crystallize upon the woman. Her aunt recognizes the unmistakable signs of passion, and far from being shocked, even wishes it were possible for her to respond. By the end of the summer the girl is cured, not only of her callow heterosexual obsession, but of the variant love also, and emerges with adult appreciation of what married love can be.

There remain a half-dozen novels in which variance plays so large a part that they should not be ticked off too briefly. The first is Ladders to Fire (1946) by Anaïs Nin, a stylistic disciple (in some measure) of Gertrude Stein. There is a minimum of action, the work being not so much a plotted narrative as a series of character analyses in poetic prose. The author states her theme in a prologue: woman’s struggle to understand her own nature. Hitherto, she says,

Of such “incomplete” women there are five in the novel. One, a cinema star with heterosexual experience, is still subjectively imprisoned within herself. A second, Lillian, is successively involved with three others. This woman drifts on the current of conventional existence into marriage and motherhood without once finding emotional fulfillment for her passionate temperament. Her first true outlet is her friendship with Djuna, whose difficult youth has disciplined and matured her but left no time or strength for emotional experience. Each personality finds its complement in the other, and their relationship is fruitful for a time, but it achieves no expression because in Lillian “sensuality was paralyzed.... She was impaled on a rigid pole of puritanism.” Soon Lillian becomes so jealous of any woman Djuna looks at that the friendship perishes of its own intensity. At one point Djuna sees that

The association with Djuna so alters Lillian’s perspective that she separates from her family and finds a man sufficiently immature to call out her maternal instincts. She humors and bears with him through all manner of vicissitudes, including his many transient affairs with other women. Cured now of her fear of sensuality, she plays the man with one of his flames whose influence she fears may be lasting, in order to distract her rival’s attention from him. She succeeds only too well, and must finally terminate the affair to free herself of a second emotional dependent.

To one of his later fancies, a woman who “lived according to her caprices” and, like a man, refused to be “in bondage to the one,” Lillian falls captive also, again, as with Djuna, loving in the other the opposite of all she is herself. This affair reaches physical completeness; even so, it does not bring the pair the unity both crave. Instead it makes them aware that they are lovers of the same man, and their one night together, though more satisfying than either has known with him, ends in a jealous quarrel. Thus the author diagnoses four degrees of emotional incompleteness: lowest is the inability to escape from self; next, the capacity for subjective but not overt abandon; third, the power only to imitate man’s role, whether with man or woman; and last, freedom to play the woman but only with another woman. Just this relative rating of maturity appears original with Miss Nin.

A little later Josephine Tey, who with Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh raised British psychological mysteries to the level of serious fiction, made variance the key to two successive plots. In Miss Pym Disposes (1948) the title figure goes as visiting lecturer to a college of physical education where a formerly worshipped school friend is principal. Her interest is caught at once by an inseparable pair of seniors who lead their class, of whom an older foreign classmate says:

“Beau,” tall, beautiful and boyish, is the headstrong darling of wealthy parents. Mary is a reserved and sensitive introvert, only child of a struggling country physician. She is the logical recipient of the best position open for the following year, but the principal arbitrarily assigns the post to a fawning satellite of her own.

While practicing for a gymnastic exhibit, this favored candidate is fatally injured by the collapse of some heavy apparatus. Police investigation indicates accidental death, but a bit of circumstantial evidence discovered by Miss Pym points to Mary as being responsible for the accident. Her knowledge of Mary precludes such an idea, so she calls Mary in for an explanation. This interview is a masterpiece of reticent indirection. However, Miss Pym gets a seeming admission of guilt—though she is assured that death was never conceived as a possibility—and a promise that Mary will spend her life in self-sacrificing atonement. Since a conviction of manslaughter would not only destroy Mary but shatter her friend, her family, and the school, Miss Pym shoulders the heavy responsibility for keeping her secret and so becomes an accessory after the fact.

A bit later she discovers that it was not Mary but “Beau” who had tampered with the apparatus, and “Beau” is apparently little disturbed by the dire consequences. Mary has therefore sacrificed her life plans to save her friend. But she terminates the friendship. Murder or sudden death resulting from variance is not new in fiction. Miss Pym’s and her author’s circumventing its melodramatic consequences is distinctly original.

The same author’s To Love and Be Wise (1950) again connects variant passion with murder, although this time the crime is unachieved. A disturbingly beautiful young American, Leslie Searle, inveigles his way into a literary household near London for the announced purpose of meeting England’s best-loved radio broadcaster. Almost everyone in the book—and the cast is large—finds this young man irresistible, but they also sense that he is, in some way, uncanny. To one, he recalls certain milder legends of demonology; another is certain that “he must have been something very wicked in ancient Greece.”[49] His presence breeds complications in both household and community.

Shortly Searle disappears, and Scotland Yard suspects murder. In the end it turns out that the young Searle is a woman, who for years has lived intermittently as a man, and for many of those years nursed an obsessive passion for her cousin, a British actress whom she saw only sporadically. The latter, once a fiancée of the broadcaster, committed suicide after he jilted her, and Leslie has come to England with a well-laid plan for eliminating him in revenge. In the course of her association with his friends, however, and in particular with one who had opportunity to know her cousin better than she did, she discovers that her adored idol was largely a figment of her own imagination, the real woman having been ruthless and destructive.

In consequence, Leslie has abandoned her purpose, and merely escaped into her alternate feminine role. Despite the intuitive questions Leslie Searle raises in everyone’s mind (somewhat overstressed in aid of the plot), she is presented as a wholly sympathetic character, and can take her place with the medieval Ide and Mlle de Maupin as a successful transvestist and charmer. It is Miss Tey’s engaging Inspector who brings home to her the basic immaturity of her protracted disguise, and, one infers, converts her to a more adult pattern of life.

In the year between Miss Tey’s two volumes an anonymous Olivia (1949) was so reminiscent in style of Either Is Love as almost to suggest identical authorship. It too is an autobiographical record of experience long past, that of a Victorian adolescent suddenly transplanted to a finishing school on the outskirts of Paris. The Gallic freedom and gaiety of her new life release the girl’s nascent emotions, and she falls deeply in love with one of the two French headmistresses. The book’s value lies in the fidelity and vividness with which it pictures this first innocent passion. Narrative interest is supplied by tension between the two mistresses, who have lived happily together for fifteen years until a scheming newcomer on the staff turns one against the other for her own ends. Mlle Julie, Olivia’s beloved, has always had favorites among the students whom Mlle Cara has somewhat resented, but only now, while Olivia is Julie’s chosen, does Cara’s jealousy reach the point of hysteria. After an accumulation of petty grievances magnified by the newcomer, Cara dies of a overdose of sedative almost certainly self-administered. Beside her deathbed Julie cries out, “She is the only one I have ever loved!”—a cry prostrating to Olivia, who has had reason to believe herself also cherished. Later Julie provides some comfort by telling the girl that she has always been “victorious” over the emotional temptations presented by students, but that now she wishes she had yielded. This shows her cry to have meant that with Cara alone she was physically intimate. She predicts that Olivia will not be victorious under similar circumstances, and as at the outset of the story Olivia has said, “I don’t pretend that this experience was not succeeded by others ... but at that time I was innocent,” it is obvious that Mlle Julie’s understanding of her nature was accurate.

A less innocent adolescent record written by Françoise Mallet, a married woman of twenty, was published in Paris (1951) as Le Rempart des Béguines, in New York (1952) as The Illusionist, and in paper-covers (1953) as The Loving and Daring. This evidence of wide popularity makes it necessary to say little here save that it describes the initiation of a French girl of fifteen by her father’s mistress, a Russian woman twenty years older with a certain masculine hardness sometimes approaching sadism. The latter is captivated by Helene’s resemblance to a young English girl whom she once adored and whose defection left an unhealed wound. As long as Tamara is independent and masculine, Helene is her slave, cutting school, deceiving her father, even reluctantly accompanying her adored to a lesbian night club. Then Tamara becomes Helene’s stepmother, and, relaxing at last under the influence of security, she becomes much more feminine. Consequently, Helene ceases to worship and looks forward to taking the dominant role herself, her weapon the lesbian relationship which her preoccupied father has believed merely an innocent “good influence.” Though the experience is hardly constructive in toto, both Helene and her author consider it beneficial inasmuch as it brings the lonely adolescent out of a phase of erotic reverie into wholesome contact with reality, and so has a maturing effect.

A last sensational and ill-written item of the penny-dreadful type was Carol Hales’s Wind Woman (1953). Here a psychoanalyst treats incipient neurosis induced in a young composer by her passion for a woman who will permit no caresses, and her resultant frustrated longing for an ideal lesbian relationship. In Laurel’s history, as revealed to Dr. Frances Garner, the author heaps Pelion upon Ossa in the matter of anti-male conditioning, not without purpose. For in the end the beautiful young analyst proves more than understanding; she makes no effort either to dispel her patient’s prejudice or to terminate her transference, and on the final page of the volume she comes as near to open proposal of intimacy as an author could risk without being sued by the psychiatric profession.

The final tale to be considered, Claire Morgan’s The Price of Salt (1951), while occasionally understated, still gives a convincing account of love between a married woman approaching thirty and a girl a decade younger. At eight Therese was consigned to an orphanage when her widowed mother remarried; she has since felt more alone than a true orphan. Ambitious to become a stage designer, she earns her keep in New York by temporary jobs and studies art at night. When the book opens, she is involved in a physically complete but unsatisfactory affair with a male art student whom she will not marry. She has had other male attention, and refuses a second offer of marriage before the story closes. Carol Aird is in process of divorcing an incompatible husband (and his domineering family), and negotiations are dragging over the custody of a seven-year-old daughter now with his family. The two women meet in a department store where Therese is employed as a seasonal “extra,” and across an unromantic toy counter they are smitten with an infatuation as sudden as Gillian’s in Tortoiseshell Cat. The older woman’s reaction is less obvious, but within a day or two she has taken the girl to lunch and invited her to spend Christmas in her suburban house. Presently she suggests a motor trip to her family home on the west coast. Therese without hesitation closes the doors on her own life and accompanies her.

Intimacy develops perhaps a week after they set out and a month after their first encounter. Another week of happiness ensues before they discover a detective trailing them. Through pique at her leaving him, Carol’s husband is bent on evidence which will give him full custody of the child. Even so, in their new intoxication the two women find amusement at first in eluding their shadow, and make a game of searching each new room for recording devices. When Carol finally attempts to buy the detective off, she is told that several incriminating records have already been sent to New York and that she had best get back to protect her interests. Promising to return in a fortnight, she leaves Therese in South Dakota to wait for her. But Carol’s return is repeatedly postponed, and she finally writes that in order to see anything of her child hereafter she must promise to break with Therese entirely. She begs the girl to give her up and start afresh. “I would be underestimating you to think you could not.”

In reaction to the shock, Therese feels not only abandoned but betrayed, as though Carol’s picking her up and dropping her had been a coldly deliberate game. Stunned and adrift she stops to work for a time in Chicago until circumstances necessitate her return to New York. She means not to see Carol again, and though news that Carol has been ill moves her, it does not weaken her resolve. Her immediate efforts toward employment in stage designing now meet with prompt, if modest, success, for even her brief association with the more cultured woman has increased her savoir-faire, and the emotional experience has given her self-confidence such as none of her contacts with men had ever done. She finally goes to an unavoidable meeting with Carol, dreading the strain but unafraid of yielding, and even when she learns that Carol has repudiated her husband’s humiliating list of conditions and thus forfeited all hold upon her child, Therese still refuses her offer of a shared apartment.

Therese has placed a design for a stage set and is on her way to a theatrical cocktail party to celebrate. She meets a British actress there in whose eyes she sees a swift flash of interest comparable to her own reaction on meeting Carol. Invited at once by the star to an ensuing private party she accepts, feeling herself now quite able to handle any foreseeable developments. But in the moment of its birth this new sense of adequacy precipitates its own sequel. Knowing herself no longer helplessly subject to Carol, she feels free to rejoin her at will. She slips away without a word to her potential conquest and returns to her early love.

Featuring as it does two women who have both had heterosexual experience, and ultimately bringing them through many more tensions than are indicated here, this narrative offers as strong an argument for the validity of variant love as Diana. In a letter to Therese after a legal session, Carol summarizes the essence of the argument:

This takes no account of the Freudian charge of immaturity against the easier unisexual rapport, and its failure to do so cannot be laid in this day and time to ignorance of Freud. It has rather the sound of indifference, if not defiance.

The majority of favorable treatments of variance since the beginning of World War II have been little concerned with avoiding overt lesbianism, just as other fiction over an even longer period has been tolerant of a certain amount of heterosexual freedom. This fact, along with the rapid quantitative increase of variance in current fiction, may point, as has been suggested, to its gradual acceptance as a legitimate area of human experience. On the other hand it is precisely toward such casual acceptance that censoring groups have directed their fire. Prize-winning or widely acclaimed works with foreign settings such as The Mesh and The Illusionist have not been heavily attacked; neither have condemnatory treatments even of such low calibre as Naked Storm and the reprint of Queer Patterns. But blacklists have lumped Spring Fire, Appointment in Paris, and Women’s Barracks with the heterosexual excesses of Mickey Spillane for censure (justified, if at all, only in the case of the first book), and these titles seem to have been withdrawn from sales-racks. Even if the pendulum swings back to greater conservatism, however, as it has done periodically in the course of literary history, its new position will not be identical with any earlier one. The overworked metaphor of spiral progress may apply here as to all other historical trends. To those who have witnessed changing attitudes toward homosexuality since 1900, it is a matter of regret that the ultimate swing of the new cycle must extend beyond our ken.