She says to the priest:

This may seem suggestive, but she denies physical interest when under the fires of spring and the full moon, she cries out to her nurse:

Her nurse, wise in the signs of physical ripening, does not take this for religious ecstasy.

These men are her father’s barbarian mercenaries, and Flaubert’s picture of their drunken orgy after victory would revolt a stronger spirit than that of a sheltered girl. Her first direct encounter is with Matho the Libyan, “his great mouth agape, his necklet of silver moons tangled in the hairs on his chest.” Crazed with passion for her, he steals the Zaimph [sacred veil of Tanit] from the temple as a love charm, breaks into Salammbo’s chambers at midnight, and attempts to ravish and abduct her. Naturally terrified, she summons aid in time to save herself, but she does not understand what it is he wants of her. Later she tells him: “Your words I did not understand, but I knew you wished to drag me toward something horrible, to the bottom of some abyss....”[34]

The story then centers around her personal conflict between her desire to retrieve the Zaimph and her horror of the barbarian who has fled the city without returning it. Finally, under religious compulsion to save Carthage by regaining its sacred talisman, she makes her way to the Libyan’s tent. She has been instructed by the high priest to resist Matho in no way, and consequently she submits to his embrace.

But on being questioned subsequently by her father as to what occurred, she is evasive.

Although she does not see Matho again and feels only hatred for him “... the anguish from which she formerly suffered had left her, and a strange calm possessed her. Her eyes were not so restless, and shone with limpid fire.... She did not keep such long or such rigid fasts now.... In spite of her hatred of him, she would have liked to see Matho again.”[37]

This is a master’s account of the effect of physical release on an unawakened girl.

Considerably later Salammbo is married, according to her father’s plan, to the effete prince, Narr’ Havas.

These two passages indicate quite the opposite of homosexual emotion.

When, after months of carnage, Matho is taken captive and literally torn to pieces by the people of Carthage, Salammbo is witness to his terrible death. Instead of sharing in the shrieking triumph of the populace, she “could once more see him in his tent, clasping his arms about her waist, stammering gentle words. She thirsted to feel and hear those things again and was at the point of screaming aloud.” And when Matho “fell back and moved no more,” Salammbo also collapsed into unconsciousness from which she never recovered. The concluding words of the book are: “So died Hamilcar’s daughter, because she had touched the mantle of Tanit.” Flaubert’s novel carries symbolic overtones not apparent in brief summary, and since Tanit was allied to the Roman Bona Dea, goddess of sexual fulfillment and fertility, her Zaimph doubtless represents heterosexual passion. Salammbo, conditioned to asceticism throughout her early life, dies of the unresolved conflict between these two dominating drives.

* * *

A minor novel which Krafft-Ebing mentions as also “mainly lesbian in theme”[39] may shed some light on what he intended by the term. It is Ernest Feydeau’s La Comtesse de Chalis (1867), in which a dashing Parisian beauty neglects her children and tubercular husband for a spectacular career in le haut monde. An idealistic and infatuated professor of the new Ecole Normale, who is keenly aware of belonging to a lower social class, ruins himself financially in his attempt to maintain a place in the countess’s world. The story, told by him, is chiefly concerned with his efforts to save her from the frivolous and corrupt life of her circle. Her evil genius is a fabulously wealthy Prince Titiane, diseased and depraved at twenty-one, whom she repeatedly promises to dismiss from her life but to whose influence she continuously succumbs. She goes gradually from bad to worse, and ends by consorting à trois with him and one of the city’s celebrated courtesans, his long-time mistress; however, this situation develops only in the last pages of a lengthy volume. The Prince is described throughout as so effeminate in appearance, dress, and appurtenances that it would be easy to imagine him a woman in disguise, but there is no textual support for such an inference. Late in the story it develops that it is solely his use of the whip which binds the countess to him, and that this flagellation is without sexual sequel, since Titiane is impotent.

Aside from being unusually tall and arrogant, the countess has no masculine attributes whatever, either physical or psychological, and it is never she who wields the lash. Her dominant motive is an egotistic compulsion to be the most dazzling figure in Paris. Since the fantastic young Croesus, Titiane, is the arbiter of social destinies in her particular world, she is slavishly submissive to him. Her interest in the courtesan, though it is charged with emotion throughout, appears to be the obsession of an ambitious woman with the techniques of a serious rival, and the emotion is predominantly jealousy. Her final indulgence in sexual promiscuity results from her determination to be outdone by that rival in no field whatsoever. Analyzed by a modern psychiatrist, the countess would be diagnosed as a complete narcissist, unable to care the slightest for anyone but herself.

Consideration of these two novels suggests that to Krafft-Ebing any failure of feminine heterosexual adjustment was included in that “contrary sexual feeling” which was equated throughout his later study with active homosexuality. As we have seen, modern psychoanalysts consider narcissism and homosexuality as closely related in etiology; yet it is confusing to have the more specific term applied to experiences which, like Salammbo’s and the countess’s, include relations with men and none with their own sex. “Mainly lesbian in theme” La Comtesse de Chalis certainly is not.

The fact that in a contemporary novel considered later, Feydeau’s La Comtesse was bracketed with Gautier’s Mlle Maupin and Balzac’s Girl with the Golden Eyes may also have contributed to Krafft-Ebing’s thinking it more “lesbian” than it is. Indeed, the modern investigator sometimes suspects that scientific writers had not read all of the belletristic titles they referred to but were satisfied to rely on the word of others with respect to them. Another detail which might have strengthened an impression of similarity to Balzac is Feydeau’s denunciation of le haut monde in imitation of Balzac’s earlier indictment of metropolitan life in general. The new element in Feydeau is acute class consciousness in his condemnation of the “idle rich.” However second-rate from an artistic standpoint La Comtesse de Chalis may be, it is a remarkably exact contemporary record of “the mixture of splendor and misery ... the sense of uneasy satiety, of restless torpor, of indefinable dread” described by the modern Albert Guérard as prevailing in the late Second Empire.[40]

Evidence from Poets

Although fiction made up so preponderant a part of variant writing in the nineteenth century, poetry also made a sizable contribution. In 1816, Coleridge, who with Wordsworth is generally thought of as initiating the Romantic Period in England, published two parts of a narrative poem, Christabel, which was never finished. All college students of literature know that eerie fragment of medieval romance with its occult overtones.

Christabel, the innocent heroine whose betrothed is “far away” on a knightly quest, steals out from her father’s castle at midnight to pray for her lover beneath a giant oak hung with mistletoe—a test of maidenly courage in the face of both natural and occult darkness, for oak and mistletoe still retain pre-Christian connotations. In the moonlit wood she finds a distressed lady, Geraldine, who tells a story of kidnaping and violence designed to win her sympathy. As she helps the fainting lady into the castle certain signs forebode evil to a reader acquainted with demonic lore: Geraldine’s eyes gleam in the dark like an animal’s, she is so faint that she requires Christabel’s aid in crossing the sill, and once she is inside a mastiff moans in its sleep and embers on the hearth shoot out tongues of flame.

In Christabel’s maiden chamber while the two are disrobing Geraldine (and she alone) sees the “spectre” of Christabel’s dead mother come to guard her child, and bids the hovering spirit be off. Though she has shown fear at sight of a carven angel in the room and has made poor work of feigning prayer, Geraldine still has power to prevent Christabel’s seeing the vision or being warned, and presently the two lie down together “in appropriate medieval nudity.”[41] With fascinated loathing Christabel notes that Geraldine’s “breast and side” are those of a withered hag; still she is powerless to resist the other’s spell, and in Geraldine’s arms she falls into a trance.

Afterward “Her limbs relax, her countenance Grows sad and soft,” and in her sleep she both smiles and weeps, while Geraldine “Seems to slumber still and mild As a mother with her child.”

In the morning Christabel wakes to find her guest already clothed, but “fairer yet and yet more fair!” for now her shriveled bosom has the fullness of a young woman’s, a subtle allusion to the widespread folk superstition that sexual contact with innocent youth heals sickness and restores old age. Christabel is troubled by “such perplexity of mind As dreams too lively leave behind,” and delivers her morning greeting in “low faltering tones.” “Sure I have sinned!” she feels, but is uncertain precisely how, and prays merely that “He who on the cross did groan Might wash away her sins unknown.”[42]

Roy Basler, in his Sex, Symbolism and Psychology in Literature, devotes a long chapter[41] to the poem which is recommended to the reader for its minute analysis of Coleridge’s skill in handling the whole episode. As he points out, it is “too realistic psychologically ... for one to avoid an erotic implication.” The remainder of the poem contains nothing further of variant significance. The spell of Geraldine’s touch has made it impossible for Christabel to give her father anything beyond the simplest objective account of how the woman came there, and the action merely prepares for later events never written.

Of the content of these three projected “books” we have only a brief account by Dr. James Gilman, with whom Coleridge lived later while undergoing treatment for his addiction to opium. The relevant points follow: Complications force Geraldine to abandon her feminine form and to assume that of Christabel’s absent lover. In this guise she woos the girl and gains the father’s consent to a marriage, even though Christabel is filled with inexplicable loathing for her at the altar. Had Coleridge carried through this outlined narrative, he could scarcely, as Basler says, “have avoided even more harrowing suggestions of a sexual nature” in Geraldine’s disguised courtship. Significant of her sexual duality are repeated references to her height and her arrogant bearing.

Basler points out that after 1801, Coleridge’s moral reputation was precarious because of his opium habit, and that “no man ever feared calumny more keenly.” Although the poet began Christabel and had the entire plot worked out at that time, he published none of it for fifteen years. When it finally appeared, the Edinburgh Review attacked it with “charges of obscenity” and “implications of personal turpitude,” while “parodies and vulgar continuations of the poem made the most of leering improbabilities.” The dread of further personal attack discouraged Coleridge from completing the work, and no other English poet seems to have approached the subject of variance for nearly a half century.

The next poem that appeared in England, however—Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, written in 1859—is so akin to Christabel in its overtones of folk magic and so alien to the temporally intervening French poetry on variant themes that it is best to examine it here. It is generally regarded as variant or even lesbian, but the vivid narrative is too symbolic for precise sexual interpretation. On the surface it recounts that two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, as they stroll at dusk are daily tempted by “goblin men” to buy the most luscious of ripe fruits. Though knowing the fruits to be forbidden, Laura succumbs, pays with a curl of her golden hair (having no money), and partakes alone, Lizzie having fled. “She sucked their fruit globes fair or red ... sucked and sucked and sucked ... until her tongue was sore....” After this indulgence she can no longer see or hear the goblins, and wastes away with pining for their delicacies.

When she seems “knocking at Death’s door,” Lizzie, aware that another girl in like case has recently died, goes to purchase fruit for her sister with honest coin. The goblins refuse her money and use every means to force their wares between her own lips, but she resists and returns so dripping with crushed fruit that she is hopeful of bringing some satisfaction to her sister. Laura kisses her hungrily, but more in gratitude for the dreadful risk she has run than in greed for what lingers “in dimples of her chin.” Indeed, the fruit now scorches Laura’s lips and is wormwood on her tongue, so that from loathing she is seized with violent convulsion and falls unconscious. In the morning she awakes cured, and Lizzie suffers no ill effects at all.

As a translation of voluptuous experience into decorous terms the poem cannot be equaled, but any attempt at literal reconstruction of the experience bogs down in the symbolic details. Certain points however are implicit in the text: Laura’s experience is a complete sexual release which it needs no acquaintance with Freud to recognize as oral-erotic. All the goblins are male, but they are grotesque, repulsive, more animal than human save for their ability to hawk their wares, and these irresistible wares take the shapes of ripe cherries, peaches, plums, melons, “figs that fill the mouth”—in short, the whole catalog of age-old symbols for female charms. Although the sisters are described as “Sleeping in their curtained bed Cheek to cheek and breast to breast,” there is no more incestuous lesbian implication here than in Sidney’s Arcadia. These embraces are plainly symbols of the innocence from which Laura lapses and to which she returns by virtue of Lizzie’s steadfast purity. Perhaps the only safe inference is that Laura’s “fall” is solitary, even subjectively induced (psychiatric records prove fantasy to be an adequate agent). Her subsequent neurotic inhibition is the product of guilt, and ends in a releasing hysteric convulsion somehow brought about by Lizzie’s ministrations.

This mundane analysis of an exquisite work of art does reveal its author’s emotional pattern. It is known that Miss Rossetti had a somewhat cloistered life, largely spent in the company of a mother to whom she was intensely devoted and a sister who later became an Anglican nun, all three women being almost fanatically devout. She was twice passionately in love with men, but refused them both on the grounds of religious incompatibility. The first of these episodes occurred when she was barely seventeen. The man, a recent convert to Catholicism, returned to the Church of England when he discovered that Christina would not marry a papist, but later reverted to Rome, and the whole affair seems to have constituted a two-year span of acute emotional disturbance in the girl’s life. (She subsequently fainted upon meeting him unexpectedly in the street.) It may well have been that any man’s ability to switch religious camps so readily under the stress of passion produced a reaction to the whole business of sex such as we find in Goblin Market, which was written when its author was nearing thirty. Tragically enough, her lifelong ascetic repression broke during her last illness in a protracted delirium which revealed at what cost it had been maintained.

* * *

France was as always more tolerant of sexual latitude in literature than England, but even there the open-mindedness which made Mlle de Maupin acceptable in 1835 was not constant. Since it is impossible to give in short compass any account of the alternating waves of liberalism and conservative reaction that swayed public opinion there during the middle decades of the century, it must suffice to note that Charles Baudelaire published his Fleurs du Mal during an interim of clerical dominance, and in consequence the volume was condemned by the Tribunal Correctionnel in August 1857. As early as 1846 the publisher Levy had announced on advertising pages of other works a forthcoming title by Baudelaire, Les Lesbiennes,[43] which never appeared as such, probably because the title was too daring. Only three poems in the Fleurs touch upon lesbianism, but the longest of these was one of the six which were ordered removed from the volume and which were not publicly printed again until 1911.

This poem, “Femmes Damnées, I,” some twenty-six quatrains in length, describes rather explicitly the conquest of a feminine and passive young girl, half reluctant because still dreaming of heterosexual love, by a more aggressive feminine partner who decries the physical brutality and spiritual incompatibility of any male lover. In “Femmes Damnées, II” the poet watches a band of lesbians at a shore resort behaving much as any uninhibited heterosexual group might do, and accords them more than even his customary despairing compassion. Such love as theirs is doomed to go unsated, and they themselves, he says, will pass progressively to drink and drugs and “loveless loves that know no pity.” And yet in “Lesbos” he holds Sappho guilty of a “crime of the spirit” when, faithless to her own earlier teaching and practice, she “flung the dark roses of her love sublime To a vain churl (Phaon.)”[44] (Note: “Lesbos” had appeared in 1850 in an anthology, Les Poètes de l’Amour, published by Lemerre. It was omitted from the 1858 edition of that volume, but reappeared in the edition of 1865.)[45] The Catholic Baudelaire was essentially a mystic, not a romantic with that faith in Love which had been the gospel of the preceding decades. Obsessed as he was by the failure of all passion to satisfy the human craving for perfection, it is natural that homosexual passion, inevitably “unassuageable, sterile and outcast,” should seem to him the essence of pitiable futility. This negative judgment, however, is not given in terms of conventional morality.

Within a decade the wave of conservatism had so far receded that Paul Verlaine’s Les Amies, Scènes d’Amour Sapphique (1867), though published in Brussels for safety, apparently encountered in France no harsher judgment than a comment in the Bulletin Trimestriel that they were by a poet of the school of M. Leconte de Lisle, and were “fort singuliers.”[46] The slim sheaf of sixteen pages contained six poems, subsequently included in his volume Parallèlement, which described lesbian love and its overt expression more explicitly than Baudelaire’s condemned verses, or indeed than any other non-erotic work up to that time. The “Pensionnaires” are sisters in the middle teens, the younger of whom still ‘smiles with innocence’ despite the elder’s far from innocent ministrations. The pair in “Sur le Balcon,” dreaming only of the love between women, are ‘a strange couple, pitied by other heterosexual couples.’ “Printemps” and “Eté” reproduce the situation in Baudelaire’s “Femmes Damnées, I” except that here the younger and more innocent girl is neither reluctant nor apprehensive. In “Per Amica Silentia” the poet applies for the first time the adjective “esseulées”—solitary, left alone—to those who ‘in these unhappy times’ are set apart by “le glorieux stigmate,” thus foreshadowing the social isolation lamented sixty years later in the Well of Loneliness, but indicating by the adjective “glorieux” that his sentiment, unlike Baudelaire’s, is one of championship. In the final “Sappho” he describes the poet, hollow-eyed, pacing a cold shore, restless as a she-wolf, weeping and tearing her hair over Phaon’s indifference until finally she plunges into the sea in despair at the contrast between her present state and the ‘young glory of her early loves.’[47] It is more than likely that it was from this poem that Rilke derived his interpretation of Sappho’s “Lament” heretofore mentioned.

During the preceding year (1866) there had appeared in England Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads: First Series, which raised an outcry on several counts—its general “paganism,” its evidence of French influence (particularly that of Baudelaire), and its scattering of poems with a homosexual tinge. Swinburne had, in his youth, been intimate with the much older Sir Richard Burton, famous translator of the Arabian Nights and author of an appendix on that “sotadic zone” in the Mediterranean region which in his opinion favored the development of homosexual tendencies. Later Swinburne fell under the influence of Richard Monckton-Milnes, famous for a library of variant erotica. As both of these friendships were matters of common knowledge, when Poems and Ballads appeared, attention focussed naturally on such poems as “Erotion,” “Hermaphroditus,” “Fragoletta,” “Hesperia,” and the fairly numerous group with a lesbian coloring, though none of these were explicit or described a realistic contemporary situation in the manner of Verlaine.

“Anactoria” is a ten-page plaint from Sappho to a girl who no longer reciprocates her love, but it differs little from Swinburne’s many laments celebrating all love as pain. The “Sapphics” describe life on Mitylene, “place whence all gods fled ... full of fruitless women and music only.” A half dozen stanzas scattered through other poems—notably “Dolores,” “Faustine,” and “Masque of Queen Bersabe”—echo the same note. Swinburne’s attitude is unsympathetic, colder even than Baudelaire’s and more scornful, with emphasis always upon the barrenness of lesbian love, as might be expected from a poet who occasionally made almost a fetish of baby-worship.

All of the longer biographies of Swinburne give some account of a projected narrative in mixed prose and verse upon which he worked intermittently between 1864 and 1867 but never finished. What remains of manuscript and galley proof is now in the British Museum, after a half-century in the possession of the notorious rare-book dealer and literary forger, Thomas Wise. It was finally edited and given private publication in 1952 by Langdon Hughes, an idolatrous admirer of Swinburne, for whom it held the promise of becoming, if completed, one of the greater English novels. Unhappily, neither the scant surviving text nor Mr. Hughes’s overwhelming volume of annotation and championship convey to the reader much of that promise or of the author’s projected intent. As Swinburne himself gave it no title it is generally known by the suggestive name of its central figure: Lesbia Brandon. Georges Lafourcade, in his scholarly two-volume study of Swinburne, suggests that this character was drawn from Jane Faulkner,[48] daughter of one of the poet’s friends, who also inspired “The Triumph of Time” (fifteen pages of bitter reproach for failure to love him and save him from other fateful loves). For this dark, spirited young girl he seems to have nursed briefly his only “normal” passion; she responded to his half-hysterical romantic proposal with a helpless burst of laughter, and it needed but the one touch of ridicule to snuff out the hardly lighted spark.[49] Lafourcade believes that Jane herself “avait quelque chose d’anormal,” and certainly the description of Lesbia is suggestive: dark, heavy-lidded, taciturn, Byronically proud, with a pathological hatred of men. When, on her deathbed, she is tenderly embraced by the man who adores her she shows only “mad repugnance, blind absolute horror.” In her youth she had loved a governess and threatened suicide when the woman talked of marrying. Later she was an enthusiastic student of Sappho and wrote many love poems from the masculine viewpoint.

The emotional life of the hero, Hubert, up to the time of his meeting with Lesbia is said to be a quite frank parallel of Swinburne’s own. The critical first encounter occurs while Hubert is dressed as a girl, and this disguise is responsible for Lesbia’s immediate interest. Their subsequent relations are not developed in the portions of the story that Swinburne committed to paper, nor is much of Lesbia’s experience save her eventual slow suicide by opium, in an atmosphere heavily fragrant with flowers and eau de cologne. Among the disconnected residual fragments are two: “Turris Iburnea” and “La Bohème Dédorée,” in which the poet presents Leonora Harley, a beautiful but vulgar and stupid demi-mondaine. This character was said to be drawn directly from Adah Isaacs Menken, who was also the original of his “Dolores”—a fifteen page description of an insatiable nymphomaniac. There is reason, as will appear later, to believe that Menken’s temperament included a variant strain. That Swinburne intended to make use of this in his plot is strongly suggested by the following:

Further evidence that he planned to incorporate a lesbian element in the story is found in his correspondence of 1866, where he boasted that having won an undeservedly scandalous reputation because of that element in Poems and Ballads, he meant to live up to it in his current effort, which would give his countrymen real cause for Philistine horror.[51]

It is known that Swinburne was still at work on the manuscript in 1867 when his meeting with Mazzini deflected his interests into new channels. After the years of political discipleship which produced Songs Before Sunrise, he returned to the interrupted narrative. Following that, its history becomes confused. Certain passages in the hands of his publishers reached the stage of galley proof but became mixed with proofs of other incomplete work. Sections of manuscript entrusted to his good friend, Watts-Dunton, were “mislaid,” and the poet’s repeated pleas and complaints never stimulated him to find them. Though Langdon Hughes finds Watts-Dunton guilty of criminal rascality,[52] one cannot help wondering whether all this apparent carelessness may not have been well-meant discretion.

The text as it now stands is almost wholly in prose, and the few songs it contains have, like “The Triumph of Time” and “Dolores,” been published among Swinburne’s other poems. Nothing in it is at all daring; there is nothing to account for Lesbia’s variance, nor any indication of how far the relations between her and Leonora would have gone. But it is clear that Swinburne, like his hero, worshipped the repressed, intense and melancholy Lesbia, and despised Leonora, the bisexual wanton. A reasonable conjecture is that Lesbia’s early passions had been innocent; that even though despising Leonora she was unable to resist the other’s seduction; and that self-contempt motivated her suicide—a plot allowing plenty of latitude for the author’s intent to shock the British reading public.