Sex variant women in literature

Periodic fluctuations in quantity, substance and style of variant writing have already been summarized in the sections sketching its history. It is now time to review certain more subjective aspects of the long record. For example, does variant literature lend support to hereditary theories of variance? At first glance, one recurrent physical type seems to do so: the woman fitted by nature to play the man. Tall, long of limb, narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, direct-eyed, this figure has persisted from the dim era in which the Greeks conceived Artemis to 1950 when an Englishwoman created Leslie Searle. But the figure appears also in many settings other than variant literature. We meet it in the pages of romance and on the walls of galleries, on the silver screen and in élite advertisements. And, of course, many knights-errant, courtiers, dandies, athletes, matinée idols and swift-shooting cowboys are built on a similar pattern. Here the militant feminist will observe bitterly that in this man’s world even our ideal of beauty is male. But the figure is not so much male as intermediate, and above all youthful. Many of the attributes catalogued above are those of adolescence just arrived at adult stature. In combination with adult savoir-faire they are appealing enough in the young man whose advantage is merely aesthetic. In a young woman, for whom the statistical norm of height and strength falls short of her brother’s, they represent also superiority to her own kind in power and, therefore, in independence.

Because this type so captivates the general imagination, its appearances in variant literature are impressive out of proportion to their frequency. A complete count, from the valiant Ide to the undaunted Leo or Leslie, numbers roughly a score, and when one has subtracted those like Bradamante and Rosalind to whom lesbianism was never really attributed, the tally is reduced to a round dozen—hardly three percent of the variant total. Among the remainder, of whom a good many played a comparatively positive emotional role, no marked type recurs often enough to have any significance. A few figures are stocky and strong, but others may cast “a shadow thin as a blade;” some are voluptuously feminine. Nor does any one physical trait—except possibly height—accompany variance with any regularity. In fact, beyond the skeletal proportions already noted, the only somatic attributes mentioned in describing boyish women (and these not often) are deep voices and underdeveloped breasts. Other unfeminine details such as a striding gait or a brusque address, though they may owe something to hip articulation or vocal register, are usually mere mannerisms; that is, they are imitative rather than inborn. Of course these fictional data will not support conclusions as valid as those based on scientific observation, since beside the license natural to creative writing one must allow also for the reluctance of disapproving authors to provide their mauvais sujets with any hereditary excuses. Still, the long procession comprises variants individually convincing enough to give weight to their physical diversity. It is clear that the majority of variant or lesbian women observed by the writing fraternity are not masculine in physique.

Does sexual behavior, then, fall into patterns which might argue for some uniformities in endocrine balance? Again, it is impossible to classify the majority honestly, even by the simplest divisions into active and passive, homosexual and bisexual, and feel confident that the operative factors are innate. One may separate those whose passion is masculine in violence from the cool, the gentle, the maternally tender; but among the last may fall such conspicuously masculine figures as Stephen Gordon and Jan Morale. Or the aggressive Maupins or Leos may prove bisexual, the gentle Mettas and Miss Caffertys immutably set upon their own kind, and a petite and delicate Flordespine or Almond may be bold in her sexual advances. It is, however, possible to detect certain rough patterns not in physique or in sex behavior but in psychological attitude. There are masterful spirits who need to prove themselves the equal of any man, or to dominate rather than follow. There are rebels and lone wolves who defy authority or public opinion and are usually jealously possessive of the few they love. There are the more detached egotists and narcissists who see others only in terms of their own advantage and abandon themselves to no one. There are the shy and clinging who crave protection. And there are the maternal types, forgetful of self and eager to cherish and support.

If not heredity, what explanation does literature offer for these variants? Sometimes none. Lyric poets in particular simply register their sentiments and leave readers to search elsewhere for explanations of the enigma. In a different fashion the same is true in unsympathetic narratives, and those where interest lies in plot alone. In these cases, too, variants are presented, as it were, Minerva-born, but are assumed to be a recognized type sure to generate dramatic tensions. Usually, however, as in more conventional fiction, authors supply some personal history for main characters and often directly or implicitly hold it responsible for their anomalies. This last is, of course, especially noticeable in recent years since the spread of Freudian psychology. Even where no notion of causality seems to exist in the author’s mind, the same sort of background may recur in more than one narrative. Thus it is possible to identify a number of conditions, some fairly universal, some characteristic of their period, which appear repeatedly as antecedents or accompaniments of variance.

Of the universal class the most prevalent factor is some degree of negative reaction to men. In psychiatric casebooks this is often the result of sexual violation in childhood or adolescence, or of the witnessing of intercourse at an early age, which is almost equally traumatic. But such experiences and their sequelae of neurotic antipathy are rare in fiction. There a less compulsive aversion may result from rough or undesired caresses, or from their antithesis, pointed physical repudiation. Or it may grow from social neglect or slighting by men, or from deliberate indoctrination by a puritanic guardian. It may also stem indirectly from conjugal discord at home or elsewhere, through observation of a hated man’s unfaithfulness or cruelty, a beloved woman’s frigidity or suffering.

The next most frequent causal factor comprises a large and varied constellation of troubled family relations. Among our hundreds of variant women, those who enjoyed the sort of family life that social psychologists now exhort all parents to provide could be counted on one hand. Even those living with both parents on any terms would not multiply the number many times. Most often, the mother is found wanting in some way; indeed, the percentage of outright motherless girls is impressive. But, it may well be asked, what about the number in ordinary fiction? In novels of psychological cast dealing with the vicissitudes of young unmarried women the count is certainly high. The margin in favor of variant novels is further narrowed when one considers that few of these are literary masterpieces, and that minor fiction has, from its beginnings, capitalized heavily on the orphaned or motherless heroine. The reasons are obvious: a girl thus deprived can be a sympathetic character despite unconventional conduct; this conduct affords the reader escape-through-identification; and the author is guilty of no profanation of the revered mother image. Nevertheless, after all these allowances are duly made, a lack of maternal tenderness and understanding bulks large among influences leading to variant behavior.

The comparable lack of a father is seldom stressed. Paternal harshness appears rather oftener than the same trait in the mother, and the father is also sometimes a party to general parental indifference or neglect, but by and large the variant girl actively mistreated by either or both parents is fairly rare. A father fixation, on the other hand, though infrequent, is significant when it does occur, and Balzac’s Seraphita bears witness that it is not confined to the Freudian twentieth century. The badgering of a lone girl by a parental surrogate—stepmother, relative or guardian—is featured now and then, as in The Scorpion, but this sympathy-begging device is less overworked in variant than in other minor fiction. The influence of siblings in producing either sexual fixation or aversion is negligible, unless their conspicuous absence is significant, for a considerable number of variant girls are presented as actually or virtually “only” children.

All this wide variety of subjective situations apparently contributes to the equally diverse range of variant experiences; yet none in the two lists is so consistently paired as to establish certainty of explicit cause and effect. In fact, more than one family factor and a measure of sex antagonism often occur simultaneously or successively in the same narrative.

In addition to subjective influences there remains the category of external circumstances which encourage variance. And while the psychological situations remain fairly constant from one period to another, environmental factors vary considerably with time. The more strictly convention limits a woman’s activities, the more certain is her mere overstepping its bounds to produce significant results. From medieval times through the nineteenth century, to wear men’s clothing was taboo. Therefore, when Clémentine or Fragoletta assumed man’s dress, grave emotional consequences were inevitable. Today the donning of slacks or hunting costume produces little emotional impact. Similarly in nineteenth-century France or early twentieth-century England, when modesty forbade revealing the feminine body, a glimpse of uncovered breasts might stir a woman to passion, or Proust’s Albertine and her friend might enjoy a half-hour’s dalliance in a beach cabin because they had undressed together. Today, when beach, pool and gymnasium showers are communal affairs, their dressing-cubicles are unlikely to be the scene of tender passages. Furthermore, in days when woman’s sphere was definitely the home, girls who claimed independence outside it exerted a strong imaginative appeal. Artists, actresses or mere bachelor girls attracted one another as strongly as they fascinated more sheltered women. But how many such “bohemians” have aroused general excitement since the 1920s? Few, certainly, in fiction.

One objective setting, however, has for decades remained basically constant as a hotbed of variance—those institutions which restrict young women to the company of their own sex. Until well into the nineteenth century, convents or convent schools were the segregating agency. After 1850, secular boarding schools took over the role, without the occasional compensating outlet of religious emotion. With the spread of higher education in our own times, women’s colleges joined the list, and the latest additions have been reform schools, military barracks, sorority houses and metropolitan residence clubs. The results of a cloistered existence, then, might seem to argue for environment as a cause of variance just as strongly as recurrence of the “Maupin” type argued for heredity. But we have already seen that when many women wear men’s clothes at one time or another, the effect of even the most boyish is less pronounced than it used to be. As for environment, excepting disciplinary and military quarters, twentieth-century cloisters allow their residents so much more freedom than their predecessors that variant or lesbian developments within them can no longer be laid wholly to pressure of circumstance.

Thus, it appears that literary testimony from a score of centuries confirms the current psychiatric verdict: variance is one possible solution of pressing emotional problems; but arrival at this particular solution depends upon so many variables that as yet no certain predictive formula has been derived.

An aspect of the current scene not yet duly recognized in literature is the relation of variant experience to gainful employment. In the heyday of feminism a good deal of concern was voiced by anti-feminists lest women’s financial and social independence might breed lesbianism on a grand scale. But a comparison of French fiction from 1870 to 1900, when women were still dependent, with the English and American record since World War I suggests that the fear was unjustified. The issue at stake in our own time is not the influence of earning upon variance but the reverse effect of variance on a woman’s capacity to hold a paid position. Before 1900 it was normal for the unmarried girl or the estranged wife to be supported by her parents or her long-suffering husband. For the last fifty years more and more women have been obliged to earn their own livings in ordinary unromantic jobs, and to this trend fiction has not done full justice. To be sure, creative license has always allowed the freedom of an independent income to more persons than are so favored in everyday life. It is true also that in recent variant novels a good many occupations have at least made an appearance. We have met actresses, modiste’s assistants, novelists, interior decorators, social workers, a number of teachers, a trio of nurses, a department store executive and a minor clerk, and several girls employed in business offices. But in general these positions have served only as realistic backdrops for action which did not impinge upon them. In less than half a dozen cases has variance interfered with earning capacity. It gravely affected the actresses in Queer Patterns; the schoolmistresses in The Children’s Hour; a college instructor in Diana; and it constituted a serious risk for nurses in Promise of Love and government employees in Either is Love. This meagre proportion, especially at the level of mere risk, does not reflect “things as they are” according to factual evidence in psychiatric literature, and the failure of variant fiction to come to grips with this aspect of reality is a count against it. It is also a waste of one fertile potential source of dramatic tension.

There remains a final ticklish question which leads straight into controversial territory, but to which a wide range of possible answers must be considered: why are variant belles-lettres so generally ignored? When so much has been written on the theme, why has it been slighted in library collections, histories of literature, and bibliographic records? One immediate answer will be that it is generally inferior, which is to a certain extent true; but it is not inferior to a deal of ordinary literature which has not been so slighted, notably that by the same authors who have produced variant titles. According to their generation or to their more considered convictions, different persons will explain this comparative neglect by claiming that variance is immoral, or abnormal, or the concern of an eccentric few and of no importance or interest to humanity at large. None of these claims can be summarily dismissed as negligible.

Without going deeply into what the term “abnormal” connotes in different intellectual fields, it may be stated categorically that many psychiatrists no longer regard ordinary homosexual experience as pathological. Nor is the phenomenon too remote even from a statistical norm. In addition to literary evidence, anthropology and uncensored history and biography indicate that homosexuality has existed if not flourished in all times and places; and Dr. Kinsey’s quantitative studies show that twenty-eight percent of women now living have experienced “sexual arousal” by their own kind at some time in their lives. Only rarely in either literature or life are women who have known this experience distinguishable from their fellows, and many who are perceptibly masculine in physique and temperament have never known it. Variants, then, are fairly numerous, not “abnormal” in an alienist’s sense of the term, and not perceptibly eccentric.

The moral charge is less simply disposed of because it is so generally and often so unthinkingly advanced. It should be stated at once that in this discussion the morality of a course of action is referred to its effect upon the actor and his social group, as social anthropologists believe it was referred originally in the shaping of moral codes now regarded in some quarters as absolute. It should also be said, and underlined, that marriage and motherhood, despite the frequent failure of the one and the heavy burdens imposed on women by the other, appear more ultimately satisfying to the majority of women than other emotional experiences, and are certainly more beneficial to society. They are therefore the goals toward which personal and social effort should be directed, and obstacles to their success should be minimized. To what extent is variance such an obstacle and how pernicious is it in other respects?

Since human survival depends upon childbearing, if any large number of women should substitute homosexual relations for marriage and motherhood, the long range results would be socially deleterious. But heterosexual and maternal drives seem an effective guarantee against any such eventuality, and as long as numerous groups are advocating birth control as a check to overpopulation, this sociological argument against variance operates only in the realm of pure abstraction. As to conventional strictures upon all sex activity save legitimate intercourse, their apparent function is to curtail the social dangers of heterosexual license. Since even the most active lesbianism cannot be the cause of illegitimate offspring or of abortion, there is no valid case against variance on this score. A more practical argument stems from the now generally admitted psychological bearing of early upon later sexual experience. A number of marriage counselors, for instance, maintain that extensive pre-marital petting and homosexual activity are handicaps to later marital adjustment, and are therefore harmful to the young. So far as is known this claim has not been unquestionably validated by quantitative evidence, and certain authorities pronounce it a rationalization of unadmitted prejudice, but it must be recognized as the consensus of a good many popular advisors. For married women also, of course, lesbian relations or merely a consuming variant passion can prove as detrimental to marital happiness as similar heterosexual infidelities. On the other hand, for women deterred from marrying by lack of opportunity, financial or family burdens, inadequate sex appeal, or invincible disinclination, variant attachments may provide the sole chance for the experience of passionate love, and some psychiatrists consider such fulfillment preferable to lifelong deprivation.

Clearly, then, variance is not, like sadism for example, a limited aberration consistently destructive per se. It seems more nearly a lesser category of emotional experience parallel to the heterosexual and capable of as much variety. If governed by the standards of moderation, integrity, and mutual consideration which should prevail in all passionate relationships, it should not be harmful oftener than heterosexual passion. But in actual experience utopian conditions seldom prevail. We have heard from “Diana” some reasons why variant passion, unregulated by any legal or social codes of its own, is apt to be irresponsible and impermanent. Working against it also is the negative influence of sweeping social condemnation. Most neuroses among variant women have resulted from the conflict between their impulses and feelings of anxiety, guilt, or even sin. Thus the forces which would control variance are often responsible for making it a destructive experience.

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Here actually is an important reason for such inferiority as variant literature exhibits. The age-long prejudice against variance, deriving as it does from religious taboo, retains something of the hysteria which motivated witch-burning and inquisition. For this reason the whole subject is surrounded by a surcharged atmosphere to which no sensitive mind is impervious. Even the best authors are scarcely able to free their work of all controversial overtones, and partisanship in creative writing has never made for artistry. As we have seen, lesser writers on both sides of the issue may descend to outright zealotry. Fervent antagonists choose variants who would be hateful without emotional irregularity, and who, with it, become monsters, usually the more dangerous for being picturesque to the eye or otherwise seductive. Negative writing of better quality presents less-sinister characters, but manipulates circumstances to the end that variant experience shall always prove disastrous. In Mme. Adonis and Die Schwester the relatively sympathetic title figures meet violent death; in Méphistophéla, The Island, The Captive, and Pity for Women, they end in madness or severe neurosis. In minor French tales of the last century, variant couples destroy one another by excessive physical indulgence, and in virtually all censorious novels they bring much harm or suffering to those with whom they are associated.

Frank champions of variance are guilty of parallel artistic offenses. Some make society the villain and variants its romanticized victims, and become shrill in denunciation of the one and defense of the other. Even Diana and Either is Love, temperate as they are in tone, would be artistically disqualified by their inclusion of outright argument even were they more excellent than they are. The subtler defenders are also no better than their opponents. Fearing public opinion too much to betray unqualified sympathy, they, too, strain circumstance to prevent their appealing characters from enjoying happiness. Granted that in life popular prejudice makes the chance of happiness precarious, case studies and other factual records show no such proportion of suicide and tragedy as do tolerant variant novels of the minor sort. Even writers of power sometimes fall into similar tragic exaggeration, as for example Miss Sackville-West in Dark Island or Masefield in Multitude and Solitude.

There are, however, a fair number of works guilty of no gross shortcomings, and a few of outstanding excellence. When their authors’ total output merits serious literary study, critics as far as possible ignore those titles in which variance figures. Where no inclusive critical appraisals of an author are made, reviewers of individual variant works are apt to exercise less restraint, praising them grudgingly for their manner but deprecating their matter with disapproval, regret, or—what is worse—ironic or patronizing superiority. It has already been remarked that sympathetic literary treatments of variance are seldom written by men. Now the parallel circumstance must be noted—most literary criticism and the majority of book reviews are masculine work. It is only natural that men should react negatively to writing so oblivious of their own kind as is much variant literature. And this reaction must not be viewed as mere prejudice; its roots go deeper. Statistical studies of the reading done by some 20,000 persons have established the fact that the prime factor affecting reading interests, more basic than education, occupation or age, is sex.[1] The personality inventories constructed by psychologists and derived from probably even more numerous observations show that sex also determines many other interests and attitudes.[2] Thus men and women live to a certain extent in different subjective worlds—a fact recently dramatized by Philip Wylie in Disappearance.

With regard to variant literature, this means that men, who pass some nine-tenths of the judgments upon it, are attempting to evaluate a realm of experience in which first-hand knowledge is impossible to them. Naturally, they do best in rating variant material written by men, and next best with unsympathetic works by women. Some few project themselves with comparative success into tolerant studies by women whose mental idiom and emotional outlook is somewhat masculine. Djuna Barnes, Henry Handel Richardson, Mary Renault, and even Gail Wilhelm in her first novel, fared rather well at the hands of reviewers. In contrast, pertinent titles by Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, Dorothy Richardson, Helen Anderson, Anaïs Nin and Kay Boyle, were either slighted or treated with unjustified harshness considering the admitted quality of their authors’ other work. “Thin,” “nebulous,” “unconvincing,” “insignificant,” “futile,” “overwrought,” and “hysterical” were among the evaluative terms applied to these titles by male reviewers.[3] Women on the other hand had much to say in their favor, the most significant and frequent comment being that they were peculiarly sensitive and accurate in emotional interpretation.

Neither group of critics should be labeled “right” and the other “wrong.” To most women and to such men as are endowed with unusual imaginative sensibility, perceptive and well-written variant works will always seem good literature. And they are good by the established canons of truth to experience, sound character analysis, artistic structure, convincing background, vivid objective detail, and beauty of expression. To most men and—for a different reason—some women, such works will seem bad in varying degrees from non-essential to intolerable. They are bad, then, in that they lack universality of appeal. For the same reason much non-variant fiction written by men—work predominantly objective in plot and violent in action, full of casual and unimaginative sex activity—is uninteresting or distasteful to the majority of women, though it too may fulfill the other requirements of good literature.

Variant fiction is of course not alone among feminine efforts in being disparaged by the opposite sex. The battle over the quality of feminine writing is old; to do it full justice would require a small volume in itself. But a brief comment is required to conclude this long discussion. Male critics (who comprise better than nine-tenths of the whole) can be roughly divided into three schools of opinion. The least charitable maintain that women lack creative power in all artistic fields because nature has designated them for biological creation alone. (Otto Weininger[4] is the extreme example of this school, but he is not alone in his opinions.) The largest group make the point that women’s artistic efforts are almost exclusively imitative rather than original, and, without investigating reasons, they argue that this fact demonstrates patent creative inferiority. A few—Nathaniel Hawthorne was among the first—feel that

Hawthorne did not, however, live up to his convictions; he gave up writing fiction in the 1850s and fled the country because it was full of “damned scribbling females.” The average quality of the scribbling perhaps justified his flight, but his apostasy was symbolic of his sex.

The women who began in the mid-nineteenth century to write like women were writing also largely for women, and on a level to be printed in newspapers and in the newly born “home” magazines. They wrote from the limited conventional experience that was known to them and their numerous audience; sentimental religious exaltation and dreams of romantic love supplied the only emotional color in their lives. The common lot of marriage brought mainly domestic drudgery and constant childbearing, with the loss of so many children that even the universal experience of the death of a child lost its keen edge. Had such lives been presented with the austere truth to experience demanded of good literature, the results would have been read no more widely than are starkly realistic novels at any time. And most of those women authors needed to earn money. Thus, feminine fiction concentrated upon blameless romantic passion, took wild liberties with reality, and was altogether unrelated to art. But it sold in the hundreds of thousands, and it set a style in popular feminine narrative which has altered in detail from decade to decade but has not yet gone out. Until well after 1900 few women authors rose above this level save those who more or less successfully imitated men, and chiefly such men as Dickens and Trollope. This sentimental tide has always been completely alien to men, both as individuals and as critics, and it has done much to solidify the majority male opinion that women are not creative artists. Even those men who achieve some intellectual appreciation of the best feminine writing find that, in general, they, like Hawthorne, cannot accept it completely. One might say that, beginning with Dorothy Richardson and Katherine Mansfield, women have attempted to raise essentially feminine writing to a level of absolute quality. No pretense will be made here to trace this growing trend, or to separate the more from the less “feminine” authors. The trend has run to more and more subjective content, as is evident in such current authors as Shirley Jackson and Jean Stafford.

Variance is, of course, more than any other subject, exclusively feminine. Had it not suffered the handicap of taboo, probably more literature of high quality would have grown up around it. Indeed, had such inhibited spirits as Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson and Rose O’Neill, to mention only the most obvious, been less paralyzed emotionally, they might have had richer experience from which to write as well as more courage to write about it. This is not a plea for the cultivation of either homosexual experience or variant literature. It is simply a suggestion that if those women who are irremediably so constituted, and who happen also to be artists, were less shackled, the world’s literature might be by that slight degree the richer. Before that comes to pass, of course, two changes must occur: public opinion in general must come closer to the most lenient psychiatric evaluation of variance. And men must become aware of the unconscious prejudice in their literary evaluation of all, and particularly of variant, feminine writing. If they cannot surmount this prejudice, they should leave the variant field to feminine critics. Also, more women should enter the field of literary criticism.

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To conclude: we have seen that feminine variance has persisted in human experience since the beginning of literary records. It has repeatedly aroused sufficient interest to be the subject of literature, some of it good enough to have survived through many centuries against all odds. The odds have been of two very different sorts—religious taboo and masculine distaste. The first operated stringently from the beginning of the Christian era to the Renaissance, and is not yet dead. The second was apparent in classical times and has been especially evident whenever the neo-classical spirit prevailed, for that spirit exalts objective and intellectual experience, stresses the physical aspects of sex, and is contemptuous of subjective emotional preoccupation. In Romantic periods when emotion was glorified—that is, when essentially feminine values prevailed—variant literature has at least comparatively flourished. In our own day the ancient religious taboo has weakened and psychiatric values have to some extent been substituted. Now immaturity rather than sin is the socio-ethical argument against variance. To each age its own new wisdom seems a social panacea more cogent than all that have gone before, but none has ushered in Utopia. Momentarily, however, we have attained—or at least it seems to us that we have attained—to somewhat more tolerance than the elder moralists. If variance is to be always with us, calm acceptance of that fact may become as prevalent as the recognition of human evolution has come to be. And since variant literary expression appears equally persistent, it may conceivably become a narrow but similarly recognized field, permitted to come to fruition according to its own laws, and to contribute the best of which it is capable to the total sum of world literature.